WC262
W686w
1855
MffiOPATHY.
t
Presented in honor of
Solon Ri chard Boynton , Sr . , M . D .
COLLEGE OF OSTEOPATHIC PHYSICIANS
AND SURGEONS • LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
WAR, CHOLERA,
AND THE
MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
AN APPEAL TO SIR BENJAMIN HALL
AND THE .BRITISH PEOPLE.
BY
JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON, M. D.,
AUTHOR OF "THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS CONNECTION WITH MAN.'
PRO CIVIBUS SERVANDIS.
FROM THE LONDON EDITION,
PUBLISHED BY
OTIS CLAPP, AND CROSBY, NICHOLS, & CO., BOSTON.
WILLIAM RADDE, AND FOWLERS & WELLS, NEW YORK.
RADEMACHER & SHEER, AND BOERICKE & TAFEL, PHILADELPHIA.
TRUMAN & SPOFFORD, AND E. MENDENHALL, CINCINNATI.
MORTON & GRISVVOLD, LOUISVILLE.
Also, by Booksellers and Periodical Dealers generally, throughout the TJ. States.
1855.
CONTENTS
o*
J. J. G. WILKINSON'S WORK
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
Old Physic has the Cholera, 4
The Doctors directing Physic, 9
Homoeopathy succeeds admirably, 12, 13
The old Bogs of Allopathy, 14
Fatal Decrees of Allopathy, 15
Moral Fragrance of the Times, 16
Most crumpled up, 18
Great Acquaintances, 19
The expectant School expecting, 21
Allopathy's Comnlaints, 22
The Horrors of Decillionths, 24
Allopathy envies Fancy, 26, 27
Allopathy troubles Consciences, 29
Homoeopathy tackles acute Diseases, 31
Only one Way of trying Homoeopathy, 33
Hahnemann creates Materia Medica, 35
What Hahnemann has done, 37, 38, 39
Old Physic pesters Parliament, 41
My Medical Bill, 43
Medical Toleration, 415
Medical Free Trade, 47, 48
Medicine uncramped, 49, 50
The Lawyers find out Old Physic, 51
Homoeopathy lays Hands on Surgery, 52
Burgeon Herbs unknown to Surgeons, 53
The Poor freed from Hobson's Choice, 55, 56
Old Physic and the Laughter Cure,
57
Homoeopathy calls Witnesses, 58, 59, 60
Agitation not good for Conservatism, 61, 62
Mothers' Prospects look up, 63
Nurses in the Witness Box, 64
A Lady's Contumacy, 65
Master dismisses Old Physic, 66, 67
What a Board of Healing is and does, 69,70,71
Spurs for Doctors, 72
Old Physic dreads skilful Mothers, 73
Homoeopathic Khus stops 30,000 Colds, 74
Board of Health ignores Ehus, 76
Arnica tends wounded Thousands, 78, 79
Homoeopathy prevents Cholera, 80
Board of Health ignores Homoeopathy, 81
Homoeopathy cures Cholera, 82
Homoeopathy cures Sea-sick Armies, 83, 84
Homoeopathy curea Ague and Fever, 85, 86
Arnica cures the Moil of Fatigue, 87, 88
Old Physic can't give General Orders, 89, 90
Homoeopathy can give General Orders, 91
Woman and Homoeopathy, 92, 93, 94
Doctor Elizabeth BlackweU, 95
The Ladies in the Field, 96, 97, 98, 99
Florence Nightingale, 100
Doctor Smith's Beatitudes, 102
Old Physic against the Russians, 103, 4
The Pharisee butters his Victim, 105, 6
The more Haste the worse Speed, 107, 8
Old Physic spends Four Million of ours, 109
Priceless Worth of one Specific, 113, 14
Grief has its Tides, 115, 16
Ignatia heals Wounds of Sorrow, 117, 18
Old Physic leaves the Mind out, 119, 20
Old Physic leaves the World out, 121
Homoeopathy sits with the Age, 122
Decrees for the Health Minister, 123
Health Minister wins his Spurs, 124
The Country's Industry thanks him, 125
He summons the Board of Health, 128
Natural Death reappears, 129, 30
The Earth chimes in, 131
State Medicine is born, 132
Ancient Wisdom speaks, 133
The Wolf is bound, 134
The Health Minister on Fisgah, 135
Only let us do our Duty, 137
Appendix.
WAB, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF
HEALTH.
SIR, AND MY COUNTRYMEN,
1. Public casualties open the world's heart and eyes, insure the
|X progress of decent fairness, bring mankind to books, to facts, and to
' its Maker, and clear away at a heavy, although at the least cost, the
obstructions which detain us from better days. The measure of the
evil to be got rig! of, is given in the weight and stripes of the rod that
is used. The present rod is pestilence, the number of whose lashes is
not yet .complete. For what crime, or for what purpose, is the inflic-
tion laid on ?
2. There cannot be a doubt that sin is the effectual caller of all
misery, and that the cholera is a consequence of our sins. These sins
however are of many kinds, and it is not about those which have
a simply religious bearing that I am going to speak. Physical and
medical sins, acknowledged as such in the sight of God also, are those
o which I shall try to bring home to you, in order that their special
repentance, and a regeneration thereafter, may be insured. Other re-
pentances are urged by other appointed voices, and to them also let
us respond, Amen.
3. The British nation, like every other in Christendom, contains
within it many solid and compact organizations which have come
from old times, and which have well nigh all power in several great
departments of action and thought. Among these are the professions,
medical, clerical, legal, and many others. Huge social fortresses, they
stand above the interests of individual houses, nominally for protec-
^ tion and defence. Yet there is not one of them but supports a con-
tinual siege against its own times and peoples; and what is termed
reform is always accompanied by the razing of some part of their out-
works, or of the very citadels themselves. Each fortalice is taken up
by turns, and becomes the subject of an indispensable providential
assault ; the immediate cause of which is some calamity, or hard ne-
cessity, which identifies these towers of the past with our straightness,
our evils, and our sins ; and preaches a brave, God-fearing self-reli-
ance, and a fresh appeal to the sword of our spirits in the great Battle
of Facts. The medical profession, with its black, innumerable dun-
geons, is at present brought, by the benignant pestilence, into clear
opposition with the interests of man ; and it is to summon you into
the ranks of the human powers arrayed against it, that my duty now
takes up its otherwise unwilling pen.
4. The medical profession, as such, is confessedly powerless in the
presence of cholera. Medical science itself has the disease in its most
virulent form. Not a remedy keeps upon its irritable stomach from
day to day. There is no power of holding any thing healing, but the
whole Pharmacopeia rushes with noisome velocity through this mis-
erable art. Convulsed and blue-cold, half death and half physic, it
(3)
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
chatters out its horrible statistics. In place of a fountain of health, it
is, in science, the focus and epitome of the pestilence of the time.
5. And if it is ill to death in this wise, agreeing in its several mem-
bers upon no remedy, but spasmodic towards all, and keeping to none
for even successive hours, what is the state of its patients all over the
world ? According to Government figures, one half die, and the other
half struggle back into life through more or less difficult convalescence.
Clearly then there is no evidence that medicine plays any other part
than a destructive one in its relation to cholera, or that it is any other
than a violent indecent way of disturbing inevitable death beds, and
doing worse than nothing.
6. That such is the fact there can be no doubt. A short consider-
ation of the predisponents and chances in cholera will convince us of
it. Whenever cholera is coming out, and patches of country or of
city are included in its spots, whatever weakens the human organism,
and lowers the tone and harmony of health, predisposes the body to
its reception. Some populations are at their weakest in summer
heat, and then cholera takes them : others are below the high level of
a sustained vitality in the long and stunting winter snows, and then
they belong to the cholera ; bad food, fear, sorrow, debauchery, sad
early mornings after uproarious nights, bad conscience, filth, malaria,
effluvia, — all these, and every conceivable depressant, throw down
its prey into the pits of cholera, and makes recovery nearly hopeless.
Ay, and when the attack occurs, the fight for life is on the same field
of natural chances. If artificial depressants in the shape of drugs are
poured into the system, the opportunities of life are still further con-
tracted. Especially is this the case with opium, brandy, and stimu-
lants, which, where they fail to relieve, superadd most rapid exhaustion
of their own : a fact well known to the medical profession ; and this
exhaustion occurs at a time when every seed and grain of force is
wanted by life to conduct the struggle. Is it not then clear that the
statistics of cholera might be improved by simply leaving out the old
medical profession ?
7. Sir, and my countrymen ! they have a shrewd suspicion of this
themselves, and accordingly, to their honor though not their glory, in
all public considerations and recommendations they have tended very
much to leave themselves out. The profession, true to the malady
which it has, to get rid of its drugs, has betaken itself to the sewers.
God forbid that I should not honor the social office of the scavenger,
— from the adjutant birds of Calcutta to the ediles of Rome, they
are purveyors of a cleanliness, which makes their adventitious dirt into
dignity ; but then hitherto they and the medical profession, though
communicants and friends, are something apart. And no patient on
'his bed of sickness was ever attended before by a professed scavenger,
even though Cincinnatus were the man. That time has now, how-
ever, come ; and our cholera doctors employ no treatment in which
they confide, but the treatment by draining. If cholera rages, call in
the whitewasher, call in the gully-hole trapper, call in the drainmaker,
call in the chloride of lime maker, the butcher, baker, publican, and
the rapid shell and coffin maker, — and let the scrap and remnant of
the office of the medical man be, to be the caller ! No profession
ever underwent a more sheer self-abrogation.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
5
8. Don't let me be misunderstood. Prevention is better than cure ;
and the arts of prevention are noble arts. Is the medical profession,
then, to have no arts of prevention ? It has vaccination against small
pox ; what has it of the kind against cholera ? The drainage preven-
tion, the clothing and food prevention, and the thousand scaffoldings
that support the great arising palace of human health, in the presence
of disease, the unbuilder, are the contribution of numerous other call-
ings, and do not await the impertinent call of any single profession.
As the fire engines come by their own natural guides to a house on
fire, so do these necessities to the society which wants them. But
what we want from the medical man is the medicine prevention, and
no irrelevant recommendation to the navigator, the plumber, or the
mason. Yet these parties, in cholera, are literally the M. D. of which
the doctors are the jog- trot apothecary. That such a prevention exists,
I shall show you in the sequel; but the present point is, that if the
medical man knows nothing of any safeguard of the kind, he has
quitted his post, to which thenceforth others must be appointed.
9. Nursed and reared in and to the medical profession, there is a
rapidly growing set of dissentients called the Homosopaths, who
alone offer to occupy the place which the "infallible" profession has
ceded. Alive with faith born of experience, standing upon the ever-
lasting and ever-living rock of facts, they know that they have medi-
cal or healing powers equal to the emergency of pestilence, and are
willing to put them to the proof on fair terms of trial, such as will
secure their own independency of action so far as this is necessary to
a successful issue. They have printed and published all this, and
from their little house top have cried it forth with all their might to all
whom it concerns ; but they have cried to stopped ears and scornful
faces.
10. Let me here make an extract from a paper on cholera put
forth by the British Homoeopathic Association, and which gives a
few statistics in point, as follows : —
TREATED AT THEIR OWN HOUSES.
Results of Allopathic or ordinary treatment
of Cholera.
Cases. Deaths.
At Tischnowitz, in Moravia. . 331 102
" Wishney, Wototschok, in
Russia 199 139
" Merseburg. 164 101
" Raab. in Hungary, . . .1217 578
In various cavalry regiments
in Great Britain. ... 171 54
" the troops at Gibraltar, . 459 131
" the troops at Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick, . 210 59
. " the troops in Canada, . . 356 127
3107 1291
About one death in every 2 l-3d cases,
. more than 39 per cent.
Results of Homoeopathic treatment of
Cholera.
Cages. Death*.
By Dr. Baer, at Prague, . . 80 0
" Dr. Bakody, at Raab, in
Hungary, 154 6
" Dr. Duplat, at Marseilles, 60 12
" Dr. Gerstel. at Tischnowitz,
in Moravia, 327 32
" Dr. Hanusch, at Tischnowitz, 84 6
" Dr. Kliener, at Saratof, in
Russia, 183
Dr. Jal, at Marseilles, .
Dr. Lederer, at Vienna, .
Dr. Lens, at Pesth. . .
Dr. Lichtenfels, at Vienna,
DY Lovy, at Prague, . .
Dr. Marenzeller, at Vienna,
Dr. Mayer, at Pesth, . .
Dr. Qum. at Tischnowitz
and Paris, 48
19
80
40
44
80
30
65
27
4
2
8
3
8
3
0
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
By Dr. Rummel, at Merseburg, 46 16
" Dr. Schaller, at Prague, .113 0
" Dr. Schreter, at Lemberg, 27 1
" Dr. Schultz, at Vienna, . 17 0
" Dr. Scider, at Wishney,
Wototschok, in Russia, 109 23
" Dr. Vrecka, at Vienna and
Slowitz, 144 12
" Dr. Veith, at Vienna, . . 125 3
1875 169
About one death out of 1 1 cases, or little
more than 9 per cent.
[It is proper to mention, that these results must not be received without caution,
on account of the variations in the intensity of the disorder at different places and
periods. In a considerable degree, however, the Homoeopathic statements are sup-
ported by testimonials and acknowledgments from local authorities.]
TREATED IN HOSPITALS.
Casei. Deaths.
In the Drummond St. Cholera
Hospital, Edinburgh, . . 461 291
" the Cholera Hospital, Ber-
lin, under Dr. Bohr, . . 97 64
" Krunkenburgs wards, at
Halle, 104 53
" Hamburg Hospitals, Oct.
and Nov. 1831, .... 283 178
" the Cholera Hospital, St.
Petersburg, by Dr. Lich-
tenstadt, 636 317
" the Hospital, Raab, . . .284 122
" the Hospital, Bourdeaux, .104 72
1969 1097
About one death in 1 4-5th cases, or
about 56 per cent.
Cases. Deaths.
By Dr. Fleischmann, at Vienna, 732 244
" Drs. Haynel and Staler, at
Berlin, 32 6
" Dr. Mabit, at Bourdeaux, .31 6
795 258
About one death in 3 1-1 Oth cases, or
between 32 and 33 per cent.
11. " From the above it will be seen that in private treatment the deaths
under the Allopathic or ordinary method, were 39 per cent, and under the
Homoeopathic, little more than 9 per cent. ; and that in hospitals it was 56
per cent, under Allopathy, against 32 or 33 per cent, under Homoeopathy ;
an astounding difference in the first description of cases, and a very re-
markable difference also in the latter, although it is to be borne in mind
that patients are only brought to a hospital when they show undoubted
evidence of the fully developed disease, many after having been subject
to a very violent treatment, and having been dosed with Allopathic med-
icines, and many, of course, are brought in a dying state.*
* " The report of carefully authenticated cholera cases treated by the medical
officers of the Edinburgh Homeopathic Dispensary, from the 4th October, 1848, to
the 1st February, 1849, received since the first publication of this Circular, gives
the following results : —
Cases. Cured. Deaths. Under treatment.
236 179 57 None.
Proportion of deaths to cures as one to three.
" The Return of the General Board of Health of the total number of cases treated
at Edinburgh and Leith during the same period, is as follows : —
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 7
12. " In Wilde's Austria, its Literary, Scientific, and Medical Institutions,*
it is remarked — ' Upon comparing the report made of the treatment of
cholera in the Homoeopathic Hospital at Vienna, with that of the same
epidemic in other hospitals of Vienna at a similar time, it appeared that
while two thirds of those treated by Dr. Fleischmann recovered, two thirds
of those treated by the ordinary methods in the other hospitals died. This
very extraordinary result led Count Kolowrat (Minister of the Interior) to
repeal the law relative to the practice of Homogopathy^ The hospital in
question, it should be added, was daily visited by two Allopathic inspect-
ing physicians appointed by the government. Dr. Roth, of Mulfich, also,
who was sent by the Bavarian government to observe the cholera in dif-
ferent localities, and report on the effects of its Homoeopathic treatment,
published, in 1833, an interesting pamphlet, which has furnished a con-
siderable portion of the statistics above detailed. The statistics from
Tischnowitz, in Moravia, were furnished by the authorities of that place,
accompanied by a letter of the most grateful acknowledgment. Dr.
Veith, one of the practitioners whose results are quoted in the above list, had
formerly beea a medical practitioner in the Allopathic school, but was at the
time when the cholera raged at Vienna, Chaplain to the Court and to St.
Stephen's Cathedral, and whilst administering the consolations of religion
to those infected with cholera, he was shocked at the awful mortality that
prevailed ; and the idea of treating them according to the Homosopathic
system, with which he was already familiar, occurred to him. His success
was so great, that of 125 patients he lost but 3."
13. It would be easy to add to the above lists similar results from
all the great towns of Europe and America during the late invasions
of cholera ; but as one of the most certain and accessible, I commend
you to the recent pamphlet by Dr. Charge of Marseilles, in which
that physician shows the marked success, both for prevention and
cure, which has attended the Homoeopathic means. In India also
an amateur (see The British Journal of Homoeopathy, July, 1854,)
has treated 629 cases of cholera, and accompanies his results with
admirable statistics : the gross ratio of deaths being 30 percent. The
same good results have attended Homoeopathic treatment in these
past weeks in the Homoeopathic Hospital in Golden Square ; and
also in the recent terrible attack of the pestilence at Barbadoes in the
West Indies.
14. One would have thought that facts like these, not alas marvel-
lous in themselves, yet marvellously good in contrast with the deadly
zero of the doctors, would have arrested the attention, and provoked
the trial, of all professors of the art of healing. One would have thought
that they would have deserted their old bog of failures, and tried the
dry land to which Homoeopathy invites them on every side. On the
Cases. Cured. Deaths. Under treatment.
876 271 546 59
Proportion of deaths to cures, as two to one.
Or, supposing the cases treated Homceopathically, and which were- daily reported
to the authorities, to have been included in the General Return, — their deductions
would show a proportion of deaths to cures of five to one under Allopathic treat-
ment.
* This is the work of an Allopathic surgeon, the talented editor of the Dublin
Quarterly Journal of Medicine.
8 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
contrary, on they go from unsurety to unsurety, experimenting in the
same fruitless direction, and sedulously avoiding every path that pro-
fesses to lead away from their unsuccess. For this they have many
pretexts. First, they deny all facts out of their own pale. Next, they
deny in specie that the cases treated were cholera ; simply because
the average of deaths was different from their own. This is a very
common dodge. * They find that diseases under their plan have a
certain mortality, and a certain duration ; and this rate of death and
time they consider to be the law of nature, and not the condition of
their own impuissance. Thus I have again and again found that
cases of whooping cough cut short, were straightway pronounced to
be not whooping cough, because under Homoeopathy they had not
lasted six months — the proper Allopathic duration. So inflamma-
tion of the lungs was not rightly diagnosed — was not inflammation,
because aconite and bryonia infinitesimals had cured it ; whereas the
orthodox had barely cured a proportion of such cases fry bleeding
and mercury enough to kill. So that they have a ready way of lim-
iting what can be done in disease to precisely what they can do. A
very pretty teachableness for a progressive art. It reminds me of a
man I met in Paris this autumn, to whom I told that I had gone to
Bourdeaux in a day of thirteen hours. He said it could not be Bour-
deaux — that I was mistaken. I stared. He told me that he had
travelled hard a whole day from Paris to Orleans, which was a town
about a fifth of the distance, and I must be mistaking Bourdeaux for
Orleans. Finding that he was a mystic, with his eyes open only
into his own head, and not outwards, I mystified him still further by tell-
ing him that I had gone in a travelling town drawn by a huge tea-
kettle with a coal scuttle for my two horses. And now he declared
that I was mad. I found however reason to pity him : he was an
old diligence proprietor who had lost his all by not being sharp in
selling off his stock of lumber and horses when the railroad was com-
ing: his ideas were fossils ; and he had crazed into a man who had
lost the power of noting the ways of locomotives. So, methought,
the medical profession is even like that old diligence proprietor.
Hooping cough ought to last six months — if alleged to be cured in
less it is not whooping cough ! Typhus ought to last six weeks —
otherwise it is not typhus ! Pneumonia should be killed or cured by
bleeding, blistering, calomel, &c., — if it be cured by Homoeopathy it
is not pneumonia! This is at all events a new form of diagnosis;
and if properly applied to cholera will annul all facts but those of
the existing Allopathic mortality. The question is, will the people
of Great Britain allow the hideous result to be fixed as the perpetual
condition of disease ; or will it call in other healers ?
15. Believe me, Sir, and my Countrymen, I should not now be
boring your ears with either complaints or suggestions, if I could find
any way to the audience chamber of this old medical profession with
its mad conservatism. But there is no getting at it. Ensconced in
its institutions, wrapped around with all their fur, and fed with all
their fatness, it is a little Russia, or a little China in the heart and
centre of our dominions. Every grand battle it loses is reported to
it as a victory by its prime ministers, Tlie Times, Tlie Lancet, and
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
Athenceum: its disgraces are the occasions on which it distributes
stars and garters from its seat of honor ; if the Homoeopaths come with
an embassy to any of its outer gates, it proclaims in characters of
crooked fists, " exterminate the barbarians, and let them be extermi-
nated : away with the foreign devils." Nor does there appear to be
any thing but public opinion collaring and deposing it, that will bring
their great Fe Fo Fum to the knowledge conveyed by the natural
senses.
16. Its mighty General, Whang Hum, commonly known as The
Times, standing Lord High Commissioner to all orthodoxy which
wishes to be hoaxed, laced Beadle of Fogydom, is bamboozled by it,
and bamboozles it, as is the usual case with despots and their tools.
Lately I endeavored to be admitted to the presence of this big per-
sonage, but without the least success. I had carefully watched The
Times to see whether or no it would, in the interest of the British
Nation, give Homoeopathy a fair hearing when cholera was in our
houses. Day after day it was full of letters about the pestilence, in
which drainage, chloride of lime, and above all, castor oil, to which
The Times is wedded, were freely admitted to occupy columns of the
leading journal. One day, after the editors had been in the sewers
and kennels for many weeks, stirring them up, — as I should have
thought at rather an inconvenient time, — they, the editors, suddenly
proclaimed that they had a sense of cleanliness, — moral cleanness,
— of the most delightful description, from the fact that in their pub-
lic station, as moulding the opinions of millions, they had done their
thorough duty, had given every thing which offered a chance of healing,
fair play, and were ever ready to lend the breadth of that sacred trust,
their publicity, to every attempt however humble to alleviate the dis-
pensations of heaven, or to correct the pollutions of man. It seemed
to me then as if the wedding guest had not on the wedding garment ;
as if the blanched skirts of The Times were not white with the light
of innocence, but with the whitewash of a very rash presumption.
About that very day, a long letter upon the Fungoid Theory of chol-
era appeared in the journal, in which all that was mouldy was put
in the large type of a leading article, and as sulphur kills fungi, it
was recommended, though not very clearly how, to be applied to the
roots of the matter. Now, thought I, The Times has got its occupa-
tion, to wander about dirty places with a brimstone dredging box,
and pepper fungi, — The Times, the yellow-powdered gentleman's
gentleman, the Jeames of the medical clubs, — The Times in brim-
stone plush at last! Finding it honest so far, yet quite oblique with
regard to having done its duty — its two eyes, like' a Chinaman's,
where its ears ought to be, with regard to all moral unity — Idetermined
to write to it, and ask it about Homreopathy. " Cain," whispered I,
"where is thy brother?" I wrote.it the substance of this very paper
which you are now reading, but would you believe it, though the
mould and the mildew, and the fine flowers of sulphur, had been in
its largest print — second only to its "decisive intelligence" of the
fall of Sebastopol, — my facts and cures, and treatment, by Homoe-
opathy did not appear in print at all ! I had been led to anticipate as
much. Of course many letters had been cushioned before mine.
2
10 AVAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
And then I was told, but sense and duty would not let me off the
trouble of writing on that account, that The Times was dead set
against Homoeopathy, that they had a medical censor who threw out
that article at all hazards : and somehow or other it has proved that
the result is even so. I wonder at it ; yet I see The Times too well
not to know that it shall one day advocate Homoeopathy, with all
its joint-stock trumpets, and all its tardy thunders. On this, as on
every other great fact of the age, it will only be a few days after
the fair.
17. Sir, and my Countrymen ! is not the moral of all this, strange,
old, and edifying ? Here is a grand perplexity of horrors, deaths by
thousands and tens of thousands in our cities, our villages, our fleets,
and our armies ; the doctors at their wits' end, with all their resources
quite broken, — of most approved badness ; the population, the med-
ical profession, and the journals, rushing about in panic terror for
something, any thing, to stay the mischief; some looking into the air
with microscopes after floating fungi and imps to be peppered, and
have Times sulphur put upon their tails; some with wild uplifted
faces imploring Hercules Chadvvick to wash, flush, drain, and fume
away the destroyer ; some convulsively grasping at castor oil, and
with angry convulsiveness throwing it away again ; some in prayer,
and all in despair : and yet the terror-stricken crowd will not for one
moment look at the very only thing that pretends to be somewhat of
a sheet anchor, that has been proved to be such in all lands under
these fearful inflictions. Let us try all things in heaven and earth,
and in the waters under the earth, all things in sulphur and the pit
of Orcus also — all things but Homoeopathy. This is just the case
with every sinful state. The sinner is perfectly ready to cede every
thing but his own fortress, his own nonsense, his own sin. The
drunkard will regulate his diet to a nicety, wear his flannels by the
best orders, breathe the purest air, go to bed in the best time, and to
church also ; but he must have his drops : the damning facts he
ought to listen to, the weight of common sense against them, oppress
his senses, and choke his bad life, and he will not hear them. And
so it is with the opposition to all truths' that exact a central reform,
and threaten the evil heart of a system. " Any thing you please,
gentlemen," saith The Times, " but such truths. Away with them,
away with Homoeopathy."
18. Pretexts of course are easily raised to show how right and
proper it is to blink the convincing facts in favor of Homoeopathy,
and to decide against it because it is at first sight improbable. They
say that the principle of giving medicines that have the power of
causing a disease similar to that to be cured, must (though it does not)
make people worse of their existing malady. Must is a mighty fellow,
but often easily "crumpled up" by unceremonious practice. Experi-
ence is the prover and enlarger of all things, and possibilities and
impossibilities are not body at all, but the last hairs on the tails of
facts, following in the rear with the most dead obedience, and occupying
in wisdom the hindermost place of all. The allegation of the impos-
sibility of Homoeopathy is then in every physical sense a kind of
madness, and may be dismissed as such. And now let us attend to
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 11
a second pretext, that the Homoeopathic means are " inadequate."
The argument runs thus : Here is Mr. So and So, most near and
dear to me, attacked by cholera : can I trust him to infinitesimal
doses, which seem quite like doing nothing ? The circumstances are
terrible : the means of assistance look small indeed. First, how run
the facts ? The old way of treatment, whose means looking formi-
dably great, consisting of huge stores of drugs, many of them produ-
cing instant effects of poison and death, unmistakable signs of a
certain power, loses professedly, as to-day's Times states, (October
4th,) 65 out of 100 cholera cases. If this treatment, bulky and po-
tential, be not inadequate, what is ? I have already shown you that
medicine here does not do nothing, only because it does mischief.
The Homoeopathic treatment cures 70 out of the 100, or a larger pro-
portion. Here the inadequacy is far less. Let me recall to you that
power and violence are different things, but that violence and weak-
ness are, for gbod ends, generally the same. 'Tis so in other things,
why not in physic? Medicine comes from medeo, the verb, I heal;
and no drug which is not healing in its application, is in those hands
a medicine at all, much less a powerful medicine. Moreover the
dimensions of power are not weighed by scales, or told off on grad-
uated bottles ; but reckoned by deeds done. When I am called to
an inflammation, I know that aconite and belladonna in billionths of a
drop are a vast healing power, because I have cured, and daily do
cure, formidable inflammations in their onset by these means. I look
upon my little bottles as giants ; as words that shake great diseases
to their marrows, and into their ashes ; and rid the whole man of a
foe life size. Away then with the bigness based on quantity, and
which sits like a vulgar bully in the medical shops : great cures deter-
mine the only greatness which sick men, or their guardians, can rec-
ognize in medicine. I dismiss this, of inadequacy, as being but a
reflection of the confusion of those with whom inadequacy is the
everlasting luck.
19. A third count in the medical brief against Homceopathy re-
mains to be noticed ; the allegation that its known success is due to
Nature, and that it might pYofitably go even farther, and instead of
giving infinitesimals give clean nothing. It is remarkable that all
these charges are true of the accuser — true of the old system of med-
icine. It would be better that it should do nothing than fill the
human constitution with poisons. But its recommendation to Na-
ture is, to say the least, very suspicious. Like some doubtful char-
acter boasting of his acquaintance with lords and ladies at a great
distance, and interspersing " My friend, the Duke " in his stories, the
doctors talking, as they do of that Dame, cause us to inquire how
and when they have been honored with her familiarity. She is
abroad in all weathers, mixing with the commonest people, and most
conversible ; yet I have never heard of the doctors being with her.
They have, it is true, dressed up a hat and feathers, and some old
skirts reputed to have been hers, got surreptitiously from her butler,
stuck them on a pole of their own, and called them vis medicatrix
natures ; and this Guy they have leeched, blistered, bled and calomel-
ized in a manner that showed at once that they thought they were
12 WAR, CHOLERA, AND TIIK MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
playing with a bowelless costume : but this is the very nearest they
have come to nature so far as my knowledge goes. The Dame her-
self has ordered them from her sight, from the beginning. Eyes, ears,
nose, mouth, — all her lofty and all her lowly features, each fibre of
her self-sustaining and universal frame, abhors, repudiates and out-
spews their druggeries and violations, and names them swindlers
when they claim her friendship. Yet, perhaps, by her they mean
somebody else!
20. I fell on this saving thought in reading in a book by Mr.
Trench, on the significance of words. He finds that words gradually
change their meaning according to the moral state of the users. Now,
thought I, cpvw is the Greek for nature ; hence our word, physics,
meaning the sciences versed about our world ; hence comes physic,
the science of medicine ; a part of knowledge, a kingly part, put by met-
aphor for the whole : the science of man's physical restoration to the
harmonies of things and the music of the spheres. And then in our
day, hence comes physic, or three calomel pills and a black draught :
which last physic, or drastic purges, are no doubt the phusis — the
nature, which the doctors do know. Where they have met her is no
longer a mystery, but patent, — " portable and patent." Well, their
honesty is saved at the expense of their dignity. We now see through
it all as from a tower : Morrison's pills are their universe, the globe
to which they gravitate, and physicking is their goddess. But then
how does this square with doing nothing? Inconsistency, let me
remark, is a part of many inexact people, and sometimes saves a
character : let it now save that of medical science.
21. For nobody can mean that in doing vulgar nothing they are
near nature, who, furnished forth by her Maker, does nearly every
thing that is done. Were the perfection of medicine to lie in doing
nothing, it would be out of the sisterhood of the arts, whose busy
fingers strive to emulate the light in its passage and the heat in its
infinite throb, and worthily to sit, earning the moments, on the top
stools of industry in the shining factory of the sun and the planets.
The doctors cannot therefore intend to say, that the aim of physic is
to do nothing. There is though a class who go rather near this con-
clusion, and as it were shave nothing very closely. There is the
expectant school : the people who wait to see what will turn up in
disease ; who note agonies and sketch them, and see when they get
better, and when they grow worse : fine students of the natural laws,
ascertaining for philosophical transactions the natural duration of
fever, whooping cough, and pneumonia ; just as expectant agricul-
turists, sometimes called savages, watch bogs and morasses to see
how long they will last in the course of things, and when heaven will
drain them, and sow them for waving sheets of corn. These doctors
belong to a tract of physic recently mapped down : they are in a state
of nature, and may be called the aborigines of disease. I believe
they will easily move off farther west, as they have no hold on thS
soil : like the Choctaws and the Chippewas they will sell the land
which they do not value for a few gewgaws. Their women, sisters
of charity, as all women naturally are, will be left behind them, and
will constitute a good school of nurses, developing the grand art of
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 13
nursing on account of the very defect, or annulment, of the medical
or higher art. So that our expectants or savages will not pass out
of the world without a remnant being saved, or good accruing. The
Ruler of things brings this out of their laziness. The assiduity of
the nurses compensates for the flight of the physicians. This is a
second example of the desertion of medicine which we before chron-
icled, when we noticed that public health had come entirely to be a
question of draining, and other non-medical preventive means.
22. You all of you remember the story of the lawyer who con-
ducted the case of a man who had borrowed some useful article from
a neighbor, kept it an unconscionable time, and then returned it
'broken. There were three defences made. First, it was pleaded that
the article had never been borrowed : second, that it was whole
when sent back ; and third, that it was cracked at the time it was
lent. The charges against Homoeopathy are much of this cross tis-
sue. First, the Allopaths demonstrate that nothing at all is done ;
next, that the effects demand the special interposition of Nature ;
and now, third, we have to register, that the great agent in producing
them is imagination and fancy, whicli are usually regarded as powers
the most alien from nature's steady ways. I don't hold with the
imagination and fancy theory altogether, because sucking babies
just born, and also horses, exhibit the rapidly curative effects of
Homosopathy not less than Christians of maturity. And babies and
horses, though undoubtedly they have imagination, and are fanciful
enough, yet do not imagine in the direction of cure: which is what
the Allopathists want for their hypothesis. That the case is so with
infants, I aver on my own experience, and that of hundreds of my
brethren. But perhaps they imbibe the imagining potency through
the mother's credulous milk ; and as perhaps they do, and heartily
do I wish that all mothers were credent of Homoeopathy, I will give
the sucklings up, and assert the same fact of babes a fair time after
weaning, and before they have come to imagine medicinal effects.
Neither here, nor with horses (for, Sir, and rny Countrymen, we have
Homoeopathic veterinarians also, in large practices,) do I think that
Allopathic subtlety can underdig me. Well, but there is something
important which I cheerily admit in this imaginative resort. And I
deem that it is a feather in the Homospathic cap, that its opponents
charge us with having possession of the imagination of our public:
just as it is the sure sign of the extreme downfall of our adversaries, that
the imagination of the sick, which is commonly known as confidence,
has entirely deserted them. A doctor who has no power over the
minds of his patients, is very near the street door of every house of
them. Cures, Sir, and my Countrymen, are the things that stir the
public imagination, and cause sufferers of all kinds to cast their slimy
coils of despair, and to feel new hope and new life already in ap-
proaching the threshold of the man of health. Cures by Homoeopathy
have created the imagination of which the Allopathists complain ; and
continuous cures, year by year, sustain and enlarge it. 'Tis a
thoroughly solid faculty, and is no other than the vivacious eye of
experience directing those whose vision is but dim as yet from the
films of disease, to point their suffering faces upwards to the azure
14 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
lands of hope. This imagination, by the wonderful connection of
the mind with the body, is not only the prophet, but in part the real-
ization, of a new-born health. There is not a single successful calling
on earth that lives an hour without its own department of this great
imagination ; and when the doctors accuse the Homoeopaths of hav-
ing it, they only show that they themselves are out of the circle of
live arts and sciences, and active citizens altogether.
23. I will also go further in admission, because I love to give way
to our foes ; and now I grant that the impalpable doses lend them-
selves to imagination better than grosser quantities. I can't help it,
— 'tis an undoubted law of nature. If you can see too much, the
mind has less suggestion room. I note a few perfectly sweet glob-
ules labelled aconite, and having had previous good reason to know
them benign, my fancy has full range over the potent spirit that may
or must be enshrined in their little confectionary universes. On the
other hand, I stumble across a bottle of salts and senna ; the filthy
smell, the nauseous taste, the nasty look are so strong and invasive,
that I have no mind to think about them ; they do not converse with
my brains, but with my insulted eyes, nose and mouth : I know
they can do me no good ; and my imagination will guard my gullet
against their mischiefs. Thus it is that Allopathy is an extinguisher
to all healing fancies. I admire its impudence in parading its own
want of charms as a reason why the public should continue in love
with it : as though one's chare-goody should reproach one's Dulcinea
with her magic, her beauty, and her sweetness.
24. Well, but there is another quite different accusation against us,
that instead of doing nothing, or handling only fancy, or being the
sport of nature, we make use of the strongest poisons known, and are
most dangerous druggists. I am afraid this is not honest. For the
most part we use the same substances as our Allopaths, though on a
different principle, and in different doses. Arsenic, mercury, prussic
acid, mix vomica, are common to both schools ; but we give them in
doses ranging from the ten thousandth to the decillionth of a grain,
where the old school administers them in considerable quantities. I
challenge them to bri'ng forward one substance in nature which will
produce any poisonous effects given by the mouth in ten thousandths
of a grain ; which are about our largest doses. The case is the
same with regard to our animal poisons, which are utterly harmless
as we give them, and most valuable healers. Cobra poison and mag-
nesia are equally innoxious in our way of appliance: the lion lies
down with the lamb in the new city of health. This accusation,
however, I opine, is meant for patients, not for medical ears : they
know it is a gross untruth. Indeed, I have had experience of as
much. In one notable case that was about to be transferred to my
care, a great mad doctor, who possessed the patient and would retain
her, told the husband that Homoeopathy was all Ham, while he told
the poor susceptible wife, that if ever she placed herself under it, the
drugs would destroy her brain entirely. I would not judge him
harshly : but thought he was on the road to the same place with the
lawyer who had the three clever counts to excuse his client for the
broken utensil.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 15
25. Before quitting this interesting thesis, the imagination, I will
discurse so far as to aver that the whole class of fanciful patients are
just those who are the most difficult to act upon with Homoeopathic
medicines. There is indeed a broad distinction between the imagi-
native and fanciful classes. The former are no doubt liable to per-
manent impressions which may run on into fixed ideas that set medi-
cinal action at nought, because they set up powerful actions of their
own, not dissimilar in their ultimate form to the vibrations produced
in the frame by dynamic medicines. But with the fanciful, who by
those ignorant of Homoeopathy are often said to be subjects just
adapted to its influence, there is such a constant interference on the
part of the restless and quick mind with the organization, that not
only are the effects of medicines cancelled, but it is difficult to com-
mand the capricious patient long enough to work with steadiness
towards cure. They are one of our greatest difficulties. Not so
however when any acute and serious disease assails them ; then, by
the law of nature, which does not readily tolerate two great centres
of activity in the body at once, the power of fancy is drained of its
vigor, and the real malady comes on the scene in its physical predom-
inance. In this case such patients are as readily treated and cured
as other persons. I experience this every day, and note in it a con-
vincing proof that in Homoeopathy we have a physical force which is
especially adequate to real diseases. You have only to find out truly
what is the matter, aud to treat the mischief skilfully, and the bodily
superaddition to the patient's ordinary maladies gives way. Morbid
fancy however comes again on the scene afterwards.
26. Bear in mind then that in fact those in whom imagination and
fancy as related to bodily states are predominant, are so far less
adapted to Homoeopathic treatment than other people ; precisely
because they drug themselves with their own ideas and fancies. And
note how little the old school attends to Psychology and mental treat-
ment, when they put forth that morbid mind affords facilities to any
method of cure.
27. But then they say sometimes that our successes are the work
of diet alone. For my part I can only say that I am very little strict
in this matter of diet, excepting that I insist upon certain regulations
of common sense, in which men of all schools would agree with me.
In chronic cases, coffee and spices and green tea are nearly all I inter-
dict : otherwise 1 believe chiefly in variety, and allo\v temperance the
run of the kitchen and the cellar. In acute cases, fevers and inflam-
mations, the patient's instincts generally diet him sufficiently; he
tongs for water and diluents ; and these are allowed by every body.
In diet then there is very little difference between us and the old prac-
titioners ; and the corollary is that our superior success is due solely
to the superiority of the Homoeopathic medicines.
28. But, Sir, and my Countrymen, I see it strikes you that all these
hypotheses framed by our adversaries, and knocked down by the most
casual bowls of facts, are a cumulative evidence that in our practice
there is something extraordinary to be accounted for; that we do cure
most provokingly. You are quite right ; and I have no doubt that in
place of the dozen exploded reasons brought forward, you now cheer-
16 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
fully accept our artless explanation ; that we have indeed a principle
of a new kind to work from, an art that carries it out, a current faith
and courage such as nothing else creates; and a success and an ap-
plause from an ever-widening public, that edifies and excites us to
continual'exertion of thought and study in the delightful path of the
healing profession.
29. Instead then of admitting that we manipulate our patients by
illegitimate handles of imagination and fancy, I beg to assure you
that we simply make fair use of the confidence acquired to us by
previous acts of cure, and by this means steady and support the sick
through the long days and nights of their diseases. And let me also
add, that answering to their confidence, we have ourselves a lively
faith procured by experience of success, a faith which exerts a healing
strength in the chamber of weakness and pain. Homoeopathy has
done a marvel in giving this faith to its medical sons; had it no other
claim than that of reviving the expiring belief of the medical pro-
fession in active means, it would already have vast merits. We all
know how current the notion has become, that the doctors are scep-
tics in their own art, and the best praise which they seem to seek now
with the light and criticism of Homoeopathy burning and shining
around them, is that they give very little medicine. The most ad-
vanced among them do not doubt the brute power, but the good of
their drugs. This is indeed no positive approach to Homoeopathy,
which is a definite principle and a manifold art, excepting in the
sense that the ground and table of a razed city is a chance for a new
city to be built there ; but it is perhaps a needful stage of disbelief
for destroying that which is meant to pass away. But in the mean
time what a blessing is Homoeopathy to those who receive it, and find
in it a medical faith and hope which justifies them in their presence
beside the suffering and the sick. I can only say, Sir, and my Coun-
trymen, that before I knew Homoeopathy I was in daily moral perplex-
ity at the bedside ; experience had taught me that in many cases I
was of more than doubtful benefit : my honesty, without being struck
down, was troubled in very conscience at the means I employed, and
which (though justified by secundum artem, and statistics of secundum
necem) yet were both barbarous and questionable, added fresh stings
to disease, took away nature's chance, accelerated decay, and perturbed
the last hours of this mortal life. There was in them such a horrid
war with the sad dignity proper to death beds, with the repose of sick
men, with the sweet pity of relatives and the commiseration of at-
tendants, with all soft dealing, with every principle of cleanliness and
sweetness, that I could not but feel like a disturber and a violent man
in recommending and superintending them on many a well-remem-
bered occasion. Oftentimes I would gladly not have been called in
under such circumstances ; for though I was not fully conscious of
the fact, I now know, alive as I am and renewed by faith in Homoe-
opathy, that 1 did not believe in the medical art. What a load, what
a moral load is removed from me now ; what a delight there is in
medical practice ; what counter cheers from my own heart answering
the cheer of uninjured convalescents. And where I cannot cure, and
cannot retard decease, I have done no mischief, and introduced no
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 17
unseemliness, and for the rest I feel that I am embarked in an ever-
advancing art and science, and that future years, and my more loving
and living Homoeopathic successors, will yet win vast waste lands
from the domain of the now incurable, and plant the fences of health
and vigor in a realm of constitutions which lie as yet beyond my
feeble powers.
30. Each man, Sir, and my Countrymen, as he writes his little
book, or says his little say, takes the color of his times, and gains
that metaphorical element that lies on every word, from the hues of
the public life with which he is surrounded. Let them then say now,
that it is the above living faith in medicine, corne down to us re-
newed by Homosopathy, that makes its small resolved band not only
courageous at the bedside, but full of joy in the presence of the vast
extended lines of the medical foe : servants of a truth that makes us
free, the handful of us is more than a match for the myriad serfs of
routine and dogma, led on by the old Nicholas, Prejudice. Quantity
in drugs fails to cure sickness, and quantity in doctors will be no
more successful, though in solid-looking squares of infantry of Apoth-
ecaries and light cavalry of physicians, in rescuing the old medical
profession. The bayonet point, which is the exigency of the public
service and the sharpness of facts, shall disperse the serf masses, and
leave us victors on the field.
31. 1 must still further notice to you another dodge of those who
dream against Homoeopathy ; the common saw, that it is all very well
in chronic diseases, but inapplicable to emergencies and acute cases.
The first sure thing is, that it is applicable to acute cases, and cures
them with marvellous rapidity ; to this I can make affidavit from
daily deeds : there is a positive pleasure in the velocity and certainty
of such cures under simple circumstances of inflammation, and of
course where the disease does not fall upon the soil of a bad or broken-
down constitution. Where the latter is the case, Homoeopathy too
will do more than any thing else. My assertion is borne out by hun-
dreds of practitioners in all parts of these islands, of the British pos-
sessions, and of the civilized world ; from the Himalayas to New
Orleans, cholera and yellow fever and other kindred fiends, cower,
crouch, and run away before the Homoeopathic rifles : the experience
of these practitioners is duly registered, and may be easily read ; they
use no other drugs but the Homoeopathic means, with of course an
abundant realm of hygienic resources also, fine dieting, skilful cold
water, cheery words, real hopeful faces not stereotyped smiles, mes-
merism and the rest : and these practitioners have an abundant
clientry, who are not used to run away from them to the violent
inefficacious people, whenever disease is sharp and sudden. More-
over, these Homoeopaths are the only evidence proffered in the case ;
for their opponents have made no experiments of their means, have
no skill in making such, and are consequently out of court. All the
testimony then is on one side, in favor of Homo3opathy ; and on.
the other there is nothing but an irrational growl of impossible, and
improbable ; — words from sentiments that would have choked steam,
electric telegraphs, and all our recent gifts of God, if they could have
forbidden experiment. Our direct evidence then is a sufficient reply
o
18 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
to the unbased thought, that Homoeopathy cannot tackle acute
diseases.
32. I see, however, in the thought an entire scepticism of the
powers of medicine on the part of the Allopaths. If drugs have
any power over a disease lasting for months and years, and whose
roots therefore are of terrible tvvistiness and oaken toughness, is it
likely they should be impotent over mushroom inflammations, mere
ebullitions -of the blood, caused by cold, anger, grief, and other mo-
mentary occasions ? The Allopaths must rather mean, that in a
disease of years' standing, nothing in the guise of medicine has a
better chance of being mistaken for something, than in a disease
which kills, or ceases, in a few hours. They imply therefore that
chronic patients are greater gulls than acute. In the long run I
doubt even this. But at any rate it is evident after the fact of the
great efficiency of Homoeopathy in rapid inflammations, that all prob-
ability is on the same side : that a system capable of treating chronic
cases successfully, is a fortiori strong in combating acute diseases.
Weeds a night old are, I repeat it, more easy to rid from the earth
than primeval forests ; and such is precisely the analogy between
acute and chronic diseases. I grant, however, that you must know
how to do these small jobs of health gardening, or the weeds will
choke your field betimes. But then happily the Homoeopaths do know
how.
33. Here let me say a word about the only way of investigating
Homoeopathy. If you merely wish to know what the facts of th6
case are, you must receive them from those who have elicited them,
and whose testimony, world-wide, is unopposed. You cannot gain-
say them : you might as well deny the statistics of the Board of
Health, or the tables of meteorological observations. This is how-
ever but a passive reception, though affirmative of necessity, such
as you give to Botany, or Mathematics, or Diamagnetism, or any
other science which you do not intend to work out yourself.
But if you would be a Homoeopath you must proceed a step farther,
see practice by others, then practise for yourself, and actually treat
diseases. There is no trying, or proving, no active knowledge of
Homoeopathy, but only this. Your opinion as to what Homoeopathy
is, always measures itself by your answer to the question — How
many cases have you fairly treated, or seen treated? Every success-
ful aim with a drug lightens it up from the great sun of facts, and
engraves its angel property of relief on your soul forever : that piece
of knowledge is so active to you that scepticism will never come
near it. One such good deed with one of these natural substances
God has given us, is like a virtue to a place ; its transaction makes
hallowed ground, and creates human or historic memory. I know
no way of learning Homoeopathy at all short of this. When each
article of Materia Medica has got its knightly spurs for us in this
way, then for the first time it defends itself in our minds. So our
point is that skilful practice is the king of belief, and that he who has
not attained to that has not investigated Homoeopathy. In all this,
Homoeopathy is precisely on a par with every other business. Of course
we have here left entirely on one side those who will not submit to
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 19
this ordeal: they are in very fact those who have some other calling
without knowing it, and do not wish to enter on this profession,
yet have an unfortunate hanker against it which spoils them for
their own vocation.
34. But failing utterly to show that Homoeopathy is either impos-
sible, improbable, inadequate, slow or unready, they turn round upon
its practitioners, and assert that they are men who could not get on
in the old practice, and that therefore they have taken refuge in
Homoeopathy as one of the last forms of quackery. I am fond of
making a proper admission on this head. It is indeed true and after-
wards likely that the men who can study and apply the exquisite sys-
tem of specific treatment called Homoeopathy, must have felt ill at
ease in handling the gross, low and destructive means of the old
calling. To accuse them on this score, is to impugn all those who
have the heart to rise from the ranks ; and who feel that the lower
walk is too low and too unclean for them. Is it remarkable that a
born general, who has the word of command instinct within him,
but who from adventitious circumstances is as yet a private, should
feel choky when he is blacking the boots, or grooming the horse of
some pert ensign. Depend upon it that the pressure and goad of his
innate vocation will make him an indifferent shoeblack, and a clum-
sy stableman. And so most surely a fitness for Homoeopathic practice
will cause the possessor to fall short, both in skill and success, of the
jog-trot Allopathist, so long as he is obliged, 'by any circumstances, to
continue in a field to which he does not belong. It is reported in the
same way that John Bunyan was an exceedingly bad cobbler : and
the world blesses the fact. The progress of every pilgrim from the
lower to the higher station is likely to be accompanied with some
excellent incompetency of the kind.
35. They say too that the Homoeopaths have added nothing to
medical science: by which science they mean their own jogtrot.
Posterity however will not be slow to acknowledge that Hahnemann
has created therapeutical medicine, by furnishing it with a central
lawr round which the healing facts and instances of ages, revolve ;
which has a new breadth of inductive basis like the other new pro-
gressive sciences ; and a coextensive wealth of deductions, which go
direct into practical usefulness. Until Hahnemann was sent by
providence, there was not one drug that was known by more than
accident ; each had come up from the common people and the sim-'
piers, to whom it was known by either tradition, original hap, dogs
curing themselves by it in the grass, accidental poisoning, or some
other fortuity : it was applied to just the original cases by the faculty,
or at best by guess to a limited circle of allied symptoms : and this
was Materia Medica. After Hahnemann the leading drugs are al-
ready known in their effects upon every region of the organism, head,
chest, abdomen, arms and legs; mind and sensations : each medicinal
substance discloses a rich mine of symptoms : and what is significant,
the law of similia similibus curantur is no cold abstraction, but di-
rectly applies the drug symptom elicited in the healthy organism, to the
cure of some similar symptoms of disease. I know no instance of
the conversion of an intellectual so directly into a humanitary law :
20 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
nothing more unitedly creditable to the heart and head of a great
discoverer, than this principle announced by the lips of Hahnemann.
And in all the range of the exact sciences, there need be nothing
more exact, than the tallying of drug symptoms with symptoms of
diseases, in the hands of a skilful practitioner. It is positively a con-
crete and practical as well as an exact science — this science of the
correspondence of therapeutics with practical healing.
36. Perhaps however without an example you are hardly aware of
what I mean by this principle and this correspondence. Let me then
illustrate. Ipecacuanha is a drug familiarly known to cause vomit-
ing ; and in Hahnemann's proving a number of other affections.
Now then here, in this substance, we have a prime remedy for vomiting
when it occurs as any part of the train of symptoms which belong to
Ipecacuanha. Yet another instance. Tobacco (tabacum) produces
depression and -deadly faintness on those unused to it; and there is,
to my knowledge, no more likely remedy for those states, often cur-
ing them at once, and preventing their recurrence, than this very ta-
bacum. So also arsenic produces inflammation of the stomach ; and
it is a potent remedy for that malady. Each medicine requires to be
given in the infinitesimal doses ; for two reasons : 1. Because other-
wise it would directly increase the disease, going specifically as it
does to the very atoms of the diseased part. 2. Because in the in-
finitesimal form it has a wider and more profound curative power
than when administered in the gross. The facts prove that it is so,
and control probability.
37. We see therefore in thus giving the symptoms produced by
drugs, that we are collecting the precise means of extinguishing dis-
eases ; and by the proving of each new drug we may hope to be able
to do acts of cure which were impossible before. In this way may
we not expect that the whole field of disease which has any real anal-
ogy with symptoms produced by medicines, will be brought under
control? Most clearly so. And as all mental and moral affections
also produce physical effects on the organism, these effects can be
reached by the same means ; and the causes at all events be pre-
vented from producing lasting derangements in the body. Mental
diseases belong to a different department, but they too are in a de-
gree prevented from waxing when their natural feet are taken away
in the removal of their bodily correspondents.
38. This then is what Hahnemann has done — to evoke and train
disciplined legions of drugs to wage the battle against the legions of
disease : he found a sullen and scattered tribe of untutored warriors;
he left it a mighty army, and one whose ranks are filling with every
year : and greatest praise of all, whilst heightening his powers of
cure, he has made them utterly harmless for destruction and offence.
What other man since the world began ever set in motion the first
beginning of so great a movement. Printing, gunpowder, steam,
electricity, the true astronomy, and all the realms of facts revealed,
build up our needful parts, and edify the societies of the world ; but
this matter, of slaying the old dragon medicine, and successfully at-
tacking disease with a charmed new medicine and alkahest distilled
out of that dragon's blood, is an affair that builds the very bones and
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 21
flesh of the race, prepares new generations of health with successive
births, and is properly the foundation, plasma and recipient of all
other benefits of art and science, and of all benefactions of God.
39. But besides that Homoeopathy has created Materia Medica,
you will also find that it has placed symptomatology, or the doctrine
of symptoms, upon an entirely new basis, from which important
results will follow. In the old system, medicine has gathered up all
her knowledge under a few general heads of classification. These
are no doubt useful and convenient, as the medical man's account
of disease. But then they are somewhat abstract and scanty, and
are apt to degenerate into mere names. There is however another
department, and that is, the patient's account of the disease : a much
longer story ; full of odd sensations and experiences, and very little
listened to as yet The doctors in general only hear enough of it to
enable them to glean what they consider to be the matter according
to their classification, but a good part of the sad wealth of the tale,
passes their ears without entering them. They parry it and put it
aside as non-essential. Homoeopathy does not do this, because it
wants precise symptoms to correspond with the precision it has at-
tained in the effects of drugs upon the system ; and these symptoms
it takes from the reliable lips of the patient himself. Accordingly it
alone embraces the true and particular chronicles of disease. In con-
sequence, a new domain is entered by it, and a new nosology created.
In a universal sense, this is something parallel to what the stethoscope
has done in the diseases of heart and lungs, in which you no longer
keep at a distance from the patient's chest, and guess the condition
within, but you put your ear, 'and hear the state of the breathing and
the rhythm of the beating. So in Homoeopathy, you take the pa-
tient's words as a kind of tube which reveals to your very ear the
universal condition of his morbid sensations. A vast and untrodden
region also now awaits future medical discoverers here, in the corre-
spondence of sensations, pains and discomforts with physical morbid
states : as for instance, what the state of pieces of the brain is during
stabbing headaches, during feelings of an iron band round the fore-
head, and other parts, and so forth. So you see that Homoeopathy
can justly claim to have created not only Materia Medica, but also
the living history of disease; and the latter, by the simple and hu-
mane method of setting some store by the patient's own account of
his feelings.
40. But what Hahnemann has done will appear more clearly from
the sequel, when I direct your attention to the functions of a Board
of Health, which are now for the first time clear and feasible from his
life and actions. At present I will only remark that his shining wake
is occupied by active successors, who not content with their daily
rounds of healthgiving, are also laboring earnestly at the proving
and winning of new drugs, that fill their places in the great chart of
remedial science. Such are the additions to Materia Medica of la-
chesis, cobra, podophyllum, and many others, known nothing of by
the orthodox profession, and yet most indispensable in some of the
worst maladies at the bed of sickness. I mention this to show that
in Homoeopathy, we have a progressive science and a progressive art.
22 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
This is not the case with old physic. A progressive science is one
which, on the foundation of to-day, builds the basement of to-mor-
row, the structure of the next day, the superstructure of the next;
and so on : that is to say, which preserves the past continually in the
present. Old physic is no progressive, but a transitive science, always
digging new foundations ; busy in the bowels of the earth on Sun-
day : deserting that hole, and making a new one on Monday: another
on Tuesday : and so on through the everlasting animal weeks. It
has therefore no age in it, and, strange as it may appear, Homoe-
opathy is older than what calls itself orthodoxy, which dates its con-
stant year 1, from the last new discoveries of chemistry. Homoeop-
athy, on the other hand, holds what it has, and by the constant liv-
ing agency of its law, adds rapid accretions of valuable and really
habitable facts. The discoveries of Hahnemann are the pith and
marrow, and the first ring of growth ; others already are formed
around these: and so it will be with the mighty oak of therapeutics,
in which the vast girth of a thousand years hence, will enclose in
tender keeping the sapling of the Hahnemannian art.
41. Sir, and my Countrymen, I have troubled you with something
very like a squabble, and bandied words with old physic in your offi-
cial parlor, because, for other reasons, and besides that we have been
provoked, I meet the good-for-nothing old fellow there, making the
most pompous requests of public opinion and of the Government of
this country. After having vacated all his public functions, and in-
terfered with the ediles and the street sweepers, he comes with the
loudest double raps at the door of Parliament, to request that his va-
cant chair may be kept vacant and still called his ; and that all un-
qualified practitioners, and all branches of healing, unrecognized by
his clubs, may be summarily dealt with. Whoso is not " registered "
in his book of life, is to be hauled before a magistrate, and dismissed
the neighborhood in which his heterodoxy flourishes. Many a good
Homoeopathic sphere of usefulness might thus be cut short; and
many a private envy, hatred and malice be gratified at the expense
of the public. And the reason for dealing summarily with us would
be, that we are guilty of " irregular practice." Now " regular prac-
tice " means, if any thing, practice according to certain rules previously
laid down, but where, O ! ye sharpest sighted, arc the rules in the old
practice of medicine? I know of no rules approximating to any thing
like certainty, and connected even with the subject, but the figures
of the bills of mortality. Be it enacted then that sixty-five persons
out of every hundred attacked shall die of cholera; whoso cures sev-
enty out of the hundred is by the aggravating fact of thirty-live citi-
zens saved, an irregular practitioner. Be it enacted that two hun-
dred souls do decease out of the Ville de Paris next time that good
ship is in the Black Sea: otherwise rule, nay, experience, will be vio-
lated ; and some Homceopathist will have to bear the brunt of hav-
ing outraged the old colleges by rescuing 110 French sailors from a
water burial. Is not such irregularity in all departments of medicine
the one thing needful, and who can tell how to get it, but by allowing
the widest liberty to all kinds of practice. The wildest freaks of in-
vention cannot be more deadly than the orthodox rules. No quack.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 23
even if he came at the head of a battalion, each man carrying a re-
volver, and declared that his patent consisted in the discharge of its
pills among the crew, could be more alarming than these regulars
with their smiles before, and their statistics afterwards. Understand,
then, Sir, and my Countrymen, that the danger here does not lie on
the side of irregular practice.
42. Nothing can be gained by putting down what you please to
call quacks. There are many men and women, who from circum-
stances cannot obtain a diploma, but who have a medical eye in their
heads worth a thousand times the sigillum maximum of the best col-
lege upon earth. A Preissnitz is an example that shines with its own
unborrowed light, and shows that nature is the fountain of every pro-
fession, and raises sons to enlarge and supersede it when it grows old
and stiff'. If these men, too, are limited, and kill sometimes, it is
precisely because they now and then take a leaf out of the book of
the old routine, — because they have moments of orthodoxy and ped-
antry, and sink occasionally into the false estate o.f rules and ruts :
but where their instincts and their humanity are awake and active,
they are safe and healing. Their murders by pedantry, though lam-
entable, are as nothing to those which take place on the old plan.
43. What I should propose to Parliament, instead of this attempt
to put down " quacks," is a simple bill making it obligatory upon
each medical practitioner, man or woman, to declare their style and
titles without reserve. - Let any one in the kingdom who pleases be
a doctor, but let him or her say where they got the degree. If they
have taken it by what they conceive to be natural right, let them be
forced to add S.D., or Self-Dubbed ; or N.M.D.C.R. Lond. : the N
signifying Non; or indeed any other letters intelligibly conveying
their particular assumption. And let there be a general registration
of all medical practitioners of every class, done with no partiality for
any alumnus, or any sex ; so that the public shall know exactly the
credentials of those whose brass plates they see, and whom they may
choose to call in. By this means credentials will have whatever
weight belongs to them, and the light of honesty will shine out upon
the stock and origin of each man's or woman's first pretensions.
And as there will be no slur in being undubbed or self-dubbed, so let
no concealment be tolerated, but summary jurisdiction await those
who, after reasonable notice, are not duly registered. Let also the
taking of an unauthorized title be a case of swindling. The regis-
tration itself must be in the hands of the tax collectors, or some other
house-to-house functionaries, and be altogether exempt from the
hands of the old medical profession. And the book of registration
must be an annual Government report. The colleges, of course, can
publish lists of their own members, and any other matters of private
interest to themselves.
44. There is no more reason, Sir, why Government should directly
patronize one kind of medical education, and destroy the practice of
those medical practitioners who have not received it, than why they
should grant privileges to one set of bakers, landlords, or butchers,
and declare all others irregular. Happily nowadays, honesty and
competency have so far gained a standing, that they will take care of
24 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
themselves without the props of Government patronage ; and the di-
ploma of a good medical college, certifying to a sound education,
.will have all the force that is desirable without being armed with the
terrors of the magistracy. The fear rather is, that respectability of it-
self should overbear all other more native gifts ; and this will continue
to be the case long after medicine has entered the splendid path of
free trade. On the other hand, by opening the gates of medicine,
you will allow new medical education to arise, and by competing
with the old, to exact a greater perfection, and a great strictness in
all departments. Thereafter we shall have real medical enterprise ;
and this kind of central and lifegiving energy is the only thing that
ought to be protected by the State. The protection consists in the
maintenance of entire liberty.
45. Were the contrary system to be carried out, according to the
wish of the old profession, medical science would walk about with a
cord round its throat, which becoming gradually tighter and tighter,
must eventually strangle it. Only fancy the law against irregular
practice put in strict force, and what would happen ? After the Ho-
moeopaths were destroyed by it, the least routine of the old doctors
would begin to be eyed savagely by their more orthodox fellows : the
last set of allopathic ideas and experiments would give up the ghost
under the hangman's noose. Then another batch of more timid nov-
elty seekers would come on the tumbril to the gallows. And so on,
by successive processions to death, of all that had a semblance of
progress ; until at length a few old barber surgeons and centenarian
physicians would represent the medical profession. Wakley and Co. '
would be the Last Man — left blooming alone; tearful roses of the
desert ; for too late they might find out that though extreme degrees
of heterodoxy, such as Homoeopathy, may profitably be crushed, yet
that to carry out the principle of demolishing all medical heresies, is
to involve the sanguinary Lance^and its subscribers in one common
ruin. We appeal to them therefore, by their dear love of coin, not
to enter upon a path at the end of which their own destined work-
house lies.
46. Moreover in this land, one of our noblest advances consists in
having attained to the very reverse of this kind of slavery of articles,
tenets and subscriptions in other most important matters. Time was
when Quaker itinerants and Methodist ministers were hunted down
by the law, and baited by the rabble instigated by the gentry : but
that time has gone forever. Religious dissent is not only allowed ;
but any one can be Reverend who pleases ; provided, I presume, he
does not take a false title, and commit an act of swindling. Mean-
time, the universities have maintained all their standing; and the
claimants for their honors and degrees are not less numerous than
heretofore. Is it likely that a Parliament and a people which have for
some centuries successfully waged the war of religious toleration,
should now rear the banner of medical absolutism ; and allow the
doctors, who cannot even pretend to any such approach to unity as
Thirty-nine Articles, to eject from their houses, homes and occupations
all medical dissenters, simply because they do not bow the knee to
that great veiled idol, (which I suspect to be merely a gold-laced coat
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 25
and a pair of official beadle's breeches with nobody in them,) called
Regular Practice?
47. If all other reasons were wanting against such a consummation,
there is a reason of decency which would still be valid to every true-
born Briton. If we are to have a connection of medicine with the
State like the connection of Church and State, her most gracious
Majesty Queen Victoria, God bless her, must then become Defender
of the Pharmacopoeia, as she is now Defender of the Faith. Regina,
Defensor Fidei, necnon et Pharmacopoeia Londinensis ! The very
penny pieces would blush in their brazen faces to find her sacred im-
age so associated. The pockets of every one of us, if not made of
impudence or asbestos, would be scorched into holes by the burning
Britannia on the obverse. This reason alone is demonstration that
Parliament will never consent to place her Majesty and the coin of
this realm in so base a juxtaposition ; which yet they must clearly do,
if once they connect the State with the medical colleges. Nay worse,
but where is this to end ? Were Parliament, Sir, and my Country-
men, so weak, or indeed so mad, every other calling in the empire
would, on principle, exact a similar connection. The Queen would
become, by consent of her poor checkmated ministers, defender of
orthodox cheesemongery, orthodox old clothes, orthodox and regular
boots and shoes, and all other departments of traffic. Very shortly
after that, both Houses of Convocation would humbly petition to be
disconnected from her most gracious Majesty ; the Church in a body
would join the Dissenters, and the Archbishop of Canterbury contu-
maciously preach in Ebenezer Chapel on alternate Sundays with
Rev. Lohaire Stratekutt ; and all this ruin would have been effected
to please Mr. Brady and his aiders and abetters of the old medical
schools. Thus conservatism and medical Puseyism would in the end
turn out to be revolution ; a word and a thing which every good cit-
izen abhors. Heaven and Lord Palmerston defend us from so dread
a crisis !
48. How is it, Sir, that other branches of human activity flourish
in this energetic country ? Assuredly by no government protection.
It is a law of British nature, perhaps of universal Man, that wherev-
er a monopoly of any kind is given, an indifferent article is sure to
be the result. Were we angels instead of Angles, the case would be
to some extent the same. For one great evoker of excellence and
improvement is undoubtedly contrast and comparison of different
wares. Under monopoly, whether it be monopoly granted to doc-
trines, or to cotton, or breadstuffs, there is neither contrast nor
comparison, nor consequently emulation, but a single unvarying
method of production, and a single result. Society, made up of di-
verse members — each exciting the other in the great race of which
the world is the course, protests by its very constitution against any
nation, profession, or calling, taking up a position which is fatal to
the improvement and alteration of the individual. All this has be-
come so trite now, and in the most material sphere, that I must apol-
ogize for recapitulating it. However, there is this excuse : it is as
yet imperfectly seen that the same freedom that supplies us with
bread will also supply us with physic.
4
26 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OP HEALTH.
49. It has been too often thought that institutions create the handi-
crafts and mindcrafts that flourish under their sway, and, as I think,
often in spite of them. The fact appears to be, that in every great
nation there are successive drifts in its mind and bent, amounting to
a national organism; and which incite a certain portion of its sons
and daughters to specific occupations. Thus England has perhaps a
larger proportion of maritime drift in its genius than other countries,
— more born sailors. Now these drifts are the issue of a fire in the
very heart's heart, which is always pointing its flame finger towards
its objects. Cunning are they beyond all laws and thoughts, to find
their way to gratification, for they are human instincts a thousand
times more pressing and forcible than any animal instincts. No na-
tion has them burning in the deep kilns of its subterrene, more pow-
erfully than Britain, and hence the quantity of proverbial wisdom
directly aiming to remove impediments to their gratification. "A
clear stage and no favor" is one of these saws ; and this is in reality
all that is wanted by an industrious people from its Government.
To allow each man to get scent of the business which will be his
forte, and to exercise it without hinderance, is the single point to be
attained : and this is best done by Government assuming as its
grand end, individual freedom, and using its force to prevent all ex-
ternal pressure, (especially of bodies and corporations,) upon the
mind, thought, invention, and originality of the private man. We
may rely upon it, that at any given moment, the quantity of the la-
tent instinct brought to bear, is small compared with that which is
smothered by the circumpressure of old habits, guilds and conven-
tionalities; which act upon the genius of a nation much as Chinese
nurses upon the feet of female infants, and stunt it into ugly Chinese
beauty. If, therefore, you want more display of the genius of phy-
sic, just take off the iron shoes with which the apothecaries have
shod infant medicine, the tight garters with which the surgeons have
tourniquetted its legs; the crushing stays with which the stately phy-
sicians have given it a wasp's waist instead of a Hygeia's heart and
lungs ; the choker of parliamentary privilege which is around its
neck, and the great stone hat of monopoly which the Journalists
have put upon its head ; and let it have loose robes, and fairly grow.
You will then see what goodly proportions the Science of Healing
has, and when the cruel creases of its bondage have been outgrown,
you will find that Nature had provided it with a beauty and a
strength that only wanted a clear stage and no favor to develop
themselves.
50. It is manifest too, that the quantity of healing in a commu-
nity suffers by all privileges given to one set of professors. For
medicine is not one only, but a body and congeries — an organism
of arts; and if you endow those whose bent calls them to a single
branch, you thereby discourage and probably alienate numerous oth-
er cultivators whose genius incites them to other departments. In
this way, while a profession seems to be full, it may really be over-
stocked with one kind of practitioners who are comparatively little
wanted, and offer no supply of other descriptions, for which there is
the, greatest exigency. And this takes place because you will not
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 27
leave Nature's and Providence's work to them, but undertake it with-
out the means of fulfilling it. Such is exactly the case with medi-
cine at present. Drugs and dosers there are in abundance, and
straightway the cry is, that the science and art of healing are over-
stocked ; whereas in very fact, there are at least a dozen great
departments of that art which have next to no professors, and the
bodies of men suffer from the law-enacted banishment of eleven
twelfths of their ministers. Of consequence the young men and the
rising talent of the country fail of their native occupations, and
irregular lives and powers thrown away are too often observed
among us. Nay, these compressed and stunted instincts breed all
kinds of social diseases, and many a clever dishonesty has undoubt-
edly to be laid to the door of the monopolies and privileges that
have barred men from their rightful callings. This will be rectified,
Sir, and my Countrymen, in one matter, whenever Parliament leaves
physic entirely alone to its own private resources.
51. Of course whenever a practitioner does a piece of culpable
mischief, he will still be as liable to an action at law, for an assault,
as he is at present. The only difference will be, that his diploma
will form no part of the eloquence of counsel, of the scrutiny of
medical prosecutors, or of the prejudices of the jury. The question
will be as to the injury inflicted by his incompetency, violence, or
neglect. I do not anticipate that the actions against non-licentiates
of colleges will become more numerous than at present; for probably
there will then be fewer practising non-licentiates than now, because
medical education will become immeasurably less expensive. But
there will, I expect, be for a few years a considerable increase of law
proceedings against the regular practitioners. For as other bodies will
have come into the field on a perfectly equal footing, — bodies that use
no violent means, no corrosive drugs, no health-sapping mercurials — it
can hardly fail to happen that these bodies, and the individuals they
rear, will educate the public in their own sense of the destructive
doings of the did school, in their own horror of drugging and its
effects ; and a public, so tempered, will, it may easily be foreseen,
/resent the frequent cases of physical ruin from drugs and bleedings
|occurring among its valued members. Many new legal questions
| will thus doubtless arise: as this for instance : whether a man is not
[ entitled to compensation for having lost a week's work, or a year's
I work, from a black draught, or a hundred such, administered to the
[ patient's injury : it being proved by parallel Homoeopathic cases,
that the whole of this treatment could have been done without, with
benefit to the man's health, and insuring his speedy recovery. 2.
Whether a case of bleeding, similarly proved to be no part of the
art of healing, will not be liable to heavy costs from the doctor who
has shed blood under professional pretences. For, mark you, there is
now an art in the world which has disallowed bleeding. What the
damage for a child's teeth rotted out of its head by calomel treat-
ment, when Homoeopathy would have cured the sickness without,
and left the teeth standing ? What the damages for a little boy
ruptured in nature's violent struggle to regurgitate the nauseous
mixture which Homoeopathy would have had no call to give him,
28 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
and which left him worse than it found him, pins a Hernia for the
surgeon to take care of? I might extend the list of actionable and
criminal causes to any amount: but these will suffice. And they
will inevitably come up, as I said before, from the juxtaposition, on
equal terms, of Homoeopathy and its benign means, with the mur-
derous old practice of medicine. Parliament ought to be prepared
for these cases, of which no doubt it will have warning in the per-
plexities of the judges, declaring that all the equity is on the side of
the prosecution, but that the law requires to be brought up to the
progress of humane events. The end undoubtedly will be to strike
at the root of the mischief, and to forbid the administration of drugs
altogether in Allopathic doses; which will be no interference with
liberty, but simply with the vend and application of palpable poi-
sons. This has been done already with arsenic, oxalic acid, and
other deadly substances, so far as the public is concerned; and this,
simply because it is known that the public can do without such mat-
ters profitably, and can make no good use of them, but may do terri-
ble harm. Whenever such is known with regard to the doctors and
their drugs ; when moreover it is known that their chance of doing
harm is a hundred fold greater than that of a man who buys rat's
bane and leaves it carelessly for his household ; the same corollary of
action and law must apply to them also: and this will be the case
when once the public is instructed in Homoeopathy.
52. Nor is it alone in medical cases, so called, that Parliament will
ultimately be called upon to interfere in protecting the liberties of
the public, and modifying the institutions that have grown up under
the despotism of the colleges. It is well known what a prejudice
there is in the poorer classes against our hospitals. This is due to
many causes ; no doubt in a measure to a certain jealousy that poor
people have, of receiving gratuitous benefactions; and to a feeling
that when within those walls, they are encircled by a power that has
their bodies in its keeping, and which may try experiments with
them while they themselves have no appeal. I believe for the most
part that the poor are as well treated by old physic as the rich, and
perhaps they escape sooner out of its clutches. As they stand affect-
ed by surgery, however, the case is different ; and assuredly numerous
operations are annually performed by adroit s'urgeons that are not
warranted by medical laws. Surgery is the residuum and caput
mortuum of physic; what other skill cannot cure is left for the knife.
Hence the amount of surgical operations is determined by the state
of the medical art; where this is high, operations are few: where it
is bungling and injurious, operative surgery is multiplied. Now as
we know that old physic by no means represents what can be done
by therapeutical means, it follows that operations are in the main not
justifiable, until the patients have had the better chance afforded by
Homo3opathic treatment. To be operated on at the dictum of an
Allopath, is as if ,a prisoner were to be condemned by a coroner's
jury, and executed forthwith : when we know that there is a still
further process sifting the rights of life and justice, and that a grand
jury alone can decide on the capital events of a case. All that the
Ailopathist ought to do, is to commit a patient for operation ; the
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 29
Homosopathist alone should sentence him to undergo it. Hence the
public necessity, in the interest of the poor, of superadding, by au-
thority of Parliament, a coequal Homo3Opathic staff to each and all
of our great hospitals and infirmaries. And this could only be done
fairly by giving up a proportion of beds to the Homreopaths, who
would then enter upon their judicial functions in full medical robes.
I have long felt that a board of sanction is necessary to allow or dis-
allow all and singular operations on the human frame ; and to pre-
vent dapper surgeons from cutting off what they can't put on again ;
and this is all the more necessary, since chloroform has rendered
operations so painless at the time, that tempting bits may be lopped
without the least expostulation from the patient. Now then is the
time for Parliament, led on by Mr. Brady, to interfere. The Home-
opaths may do the old profession a kind service here ; and I am sure
that even Mr. Wakley will not be sorry to shift some part of the re-
sponsibility of great operations on to their shoulders. Should it
unfortunately happen that the medical officers of any existing hos-
pital are contumacious, and repudiate their new colleagues, Parlia-
ment can provide for the case, accept their resignation, and decree
that the whole staff may be occupied by the Homoeopathic corps.
53. I do not limit these remarks to cases ordinarily regarded as
medical and constitutional, such as cancer, scrofulous swellings of
the knee, tumors, and the like ; for in fact accidents in their treat-
ment and cure are just as much medical cases as any others. One
of the strangest laches of the old profession is its total disregard, nay
now total oblivion and ignorance, of what have for hundreds of
years been termed vulnerary remedies, i. e., medicaments that have a
direct power of healing injuries and wounds. So inscient are the
doctors of the existence of such a fact that I doubt not they will
smile at my extreme credulity in alleging it. And yet it is most true
that arnica in very weak solution as a lotion, and in infinitesimal
doses administered inwardly, has marvellous power in obviating the
bad effects of bruises and wounds of all sorts ; nay, also of bodily
fatigue : that rhus toxicodendron has a similar power over strains,
sprains, injuries of ligaments and tendons : that calendula, the com-
mon marigold, does the like Christian office for deep wounds in
which much flesh is lost; promoting their filling up, and obviating
the extent of scars : and that symphytum, (the common great comfrey,)
is as uniting for broken bones, as the others for other lesions.* The
series goes far beyond this ; so far, that in all scientific probability,
every organ and part of us has surgeon herbs corresponding to it,
and which repair its mischances. No range of facts in the world is
better authenticated than the curative powers that these substances
exert upon the effects of accidents: in common with hundreds of my
Homoeopathic brethren I see those powers in benignant action every
day. Now what are we to think of the fact, that the London hospi-
tals ignore all these things, and have nothing to put in their places :
* Solomon's seal, the common daisy, all the stonecrops, eyebright, tamus com-
munis, and hundreds of other herbs are wound herbs ; known as such to the rustics,
but unknown to the medical profession.
30 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
nothing but saturnine lotions, calomel, purges, leeching, bloodtaking,
and other remedies for inflammation that would never have arisen,
had aconite and arnica been employed in the Homoeopathic way.
Such a fact brings these hospitals at once to the judgment bar of the
public, and opinion cannot do other than demand of Parliament that,
apart from all medical superciliousness, the poor of this realm shall
have secured to them, in their hour of sickness, if not torture, the
benefit of all the means that are known for their safe and rapid re-
covery, and return to their firesides and their toils.
•">•!. It will perhaps be alleged that arnica has already had a trial
in one of the London hospitals, and failed. Sir, and my Countrymen,
do not believe it. Arnica is a Homoeopathic remedy, and produces
su ill-rings not unlike those caused by mechanical injuries; and hence,
if exhibited in large doses, (as was, I understand, the case in the pro-
fessed trial alluded to,) it will produce an aggravation of the mischief,
which will force the medical attendant to discontinue its use. The
fair trial can only take place in the Homoeopathic way, of attenuated
dilutions, and infinitesimals; it must be superintended by a skilful
Homoeopathist, and all Allopathic drugs suspended at the time. No
such trial has been made, nor can be made in our great hospitals,
until either their officers become " converted characters," or a Homoeo-
pathic staff is appointed to them, to oversee and correct at least that
part of their practice.
55. I look forward with great interest to the Parliamentary action,
led on by Mr. Brady, on this important question. The thing is so
manifestly humane, that it would be uncharitable to doubt the speedy
intervention of the collective wisdom upon it. The results to the poor
will be a new lease of limb and life in many delightful cases; while
moreover as a body, they will be converted to the hospitals, think of
them kindly when they are well ; toast them with grateful recollec-
tions, and the women with streaming eyes, when Christmas flames
shine brightly on the assembled families of many cottages. And then
the effect on the medical profession will be, to bring out the truth and
goodness of Homoeopathy in such a white light of superiority to what
they already know and do, that they will experience the happiness of
entering a new world, which the best among them have of course
always been seeking; a vast realm of healing, which their sons, and
sons' sons, will be privileged to explore. I only hope the war will
be speedily finished, to give the next session of the legislature no
excuse for withholding from us, for one unnecessary hour, these vast
treasure troves of a new humanity.
56. On a single other ground also, and one of the most considerate
kind, I would base my advocacy of the introduction of a Homoeo-
pathic department into the hospitals of Great Britain and Ireland. It
would give the poor a choice in medical practice, and it would be
seen which they like best, Allopathy or Hoimropathy. To ascertain
this would be very important ; because in fact ultimately the public
are the judges of good and bad doctoring, safe means and unsafe,
cure or no cure. So that the testimony of the masses of this country
might settle much ; might provide convenient statistics for guiding
the choice of the other classes ; and even might influence the medical
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 31
officers by showing them the practice most in demand. If Allopathy
went to the wall in this way, they could not say it was any thing but
fair : people have a right to call in whom they please : there was no
demand for the article, and it would not pay to supply it. Patients
also could compare notes with each other so well under these circum-
stances : the man who had used arnica and symphytum for his broken
leg on the same day that the other broken leg had been left to nature
assisted by leeches, liquor plumbi, and pill and draught, in dancing a
hornpipe to his still bedridden allopathized brother, would be so very
contrastive, and the induction so Baconian and immediate. The
men who had fallen from a scaffolding together, and both concussed
their brains, and of whom the one had received a tasteless arnica and
belladonna (which " could do no good," as the Allopathist said when
he went with his drawn lancet at the jugular of the other,) while the
second had had all inflammation prevented by drawing all that was red
out of his veins till his lips were as white as mushroom stalks, and his
toes as cold ; — these two men. of whom the arnica victim assisted in
the ward in the last offices to the thoroughly and scientifically and
orthodoxly and coroner's-inquestly treated other ; — these two men,
as I said before, would furnish medical politics for the hospital, if
they could only occur in one ward. Unhappily now they happen re-
mote from each other; and the benefit of comparison and contrast
is lost. Shall not science be entitled (by Parliament, led on by Mr.
Brady) to receive the edifying spark of their collision ?
57. I would give the world myself to be present in the waiting
room for out patients, after the two classes of patients are duly re-
ceived together : to see the passions, emotions, conditions, that could
not fail to be called out : to find all the joking gradually shifting sides.
The laughter would of course begin against the Homoeopaths, " who
can do nothing;" but not slowly English mother wit would stand
upon its right heels. As soon as it became a matter of choice, those
who chose bleeding, blistering, mercurializing, purging, nauseating,
would become fair game for the opposite patients, and excepting in
the case of heavy sickness, when pity alone and silence could prevail,
they would have to go, each man with his quart bottle, to his self-
appointed and dirty doom, through such a fire of jests as once hearing
would create a Dickens, and running over fill a Thackeray in its
course. The police would have to interfere to keep the editors of
Punch from the spot, to which. they would come rushing, " each with
his golden urn," " drawing light." But I forbear to dwell on this im-
portant scene, which will assuredly take place one day in our grave
infirmaries ; though whenever that day dawns, the laughter cure will
show how various nature is in her possibilities of restoration.
58. Now, Sir, and my Countrymen, a good general takes into ac-
count the hinderances and difficulties which are likely to interfere with
his plans, lays all down beforehand, has expedients for emergencies,
reckons losses, leaves a margin for the exaggeration of hope and fore-
casting, has reserves of courage stationed firm in his heart against
disappointments ; and in short works with the eye and hand of genius
and tactics upon the whole broad field of occasion. I have striven to
emulate such a man, and as I foresee difficulties, even if we should
32 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
have the powerful assistance of Parliament led on by Mr. Brady, I
would humbly propose another strategy, should the Allopathic for-
tress not capitulate at once. The mode has succeeded already with
Corn Laws, and Navigation Laws, and might equally avail to put us
right on this vital matter of the Physic Laws. I propose then a
Parliamentary Committee, to inquire into the effects of drugs and the
drugging si/stem, and of bleeding, upon the health of the population of
Great Britain and Ireland. This will be a fair part, nay, a capital
front and beginning to the sanitary movement. And the Blue Book
which issues from the labors of that, committee, will serve as an
important index for medical reform. The public will be deeply inter-
ested in it, which is more than can be said of the Parliamentary action
upon medical titles and registration, which, though transacted in the
highest court, is nothing more than the echo of professional squab-
bles. A material part of the inquiry may consist in returns of the
imports and vend, by the great drug houses, of calomel, opium, iodine,
drastic purges, narcotic extracts generally, and all the more virulent
drugs ; also of the quantities of the same consumed in the great hospi-
tals respectively. This will give an approximative conception of what
the public undergoes in medical treatment, and whether any marked
effects upon public health are likely to be the result. It will rest, of
course, with the committee to call what witnesses they please; and
they, and the legal gentlemen associated with them to make the
proper astuteness up, will devise the means of procuring impartial
evidence with a mastership of which I can have no idea. In the
mean time it is clear, as they wish to learn the effects of drugging on
the sick, and as the allopathic doctors, though sick enough, are pro-
verbial for not taking their* own medicines, that it will not be neces-
sary to put any direct questions to the medical profession. At best
it may be enough to query one or two renowned physicians, just to
ascertain what can be said, but with no view to the facts of the case.
It is the patients of the United Kingdom who have to depose how
they feel and are after the drugs.
59. Probably the masters of great factories might be useful wit-
nesses to call among the first : I mean, some of those humane chiefs
of industry, who make it their business to observe the condition of
their workmen ; and who are so well respected, that if they were to
issue a request to the men in their employ, they could easily obtain a
reliable statistic, with concrete details, of what had been the upshot
of the doctoring in several hundred families. They might learn how
many children had died under assiduous treatment; whether calomel
and blistering had been largely or long employed in each case ; how
many leechings or bleedings had preceded dissolution ; and whether
the treatment had been satisfactory to the parents or not: also whether
in their notion physicking was any cause of poverty, by wearing out
the mothers, and weakening the right arms of the laboring population.
They might also ascertain whether in a hundred cases, any proportion
of the patients fell into bad habits of which the seeds were sown by
the use of drugs ; whether, for example, a little opium pill gave, in.
any determinable ratio, a taste for a little bigger piece of opium after-
wards, and laid the foundation for opium eating or laudanum drink-
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 33
ing : and whether the supply of warm substances for a sinking at the
stomach ever, and in how many cases, led to intemperance. Also
whether the enfeebling caused (that is, if caused) by bleeding and
drugging, ever, and in how many cases, conducted to the same result,
as an escape from the depression of mind and body. They may also
inquire whether the habit of poisoning, which has appeared as a
horrid nightshade in some of our rural districts, had been sown un-
wittingly in bad minds by the propagation of the drugging system.
Benefit societies and clubs might usefully furnish some facts, partic-
ularly as they now include patients of various systems ; and it might
be seen whether the allopathized sick, for example, were longer laid
up than others ; and whether bled and calomelized persons were soon
on the sick list again, or the contrary. Details might also be invited,
especially from the benevolent clergy, of outlying districts and ham-
lets, where doctors are few ; and above all, of any remote oases where
there are none at all: details respecting the longevity of the popula-
tion there : whether the poor people crumble away rapidly in the
absence of allopathic cement ; or whether there is still a trace of that
sturdiness that marks the English yeoman, and even occasional in-
stances in those drear localities of silver-haired grandsires on the old
bench under the grandeval oak tree at even, surrounded by their
children's children, all laughing with merry teeth, jocund faces, and
spirit eyes. It is impossible to state what would be the answer of
the public to the inquiry ; but the putting of the questions would
cause a great deal of medical thought, and true sanitary spirit in the
population ; and if it did probe painful spots, and sometimes renew
agonies of vain regret, and bitter feelings, it would still be wholesome
for future, and above all, for Parliamentary guidance. And for these
reasons I do not see how such a commission can properly fail to
have the powerful advocacy of Mr. Brady.
60. Should Mr. Brady be chairman of the committee, I would hint
into his most, private ear, that he may gain some credit, and elicit
facts, by calling to the table edge some of the dentists in large practice
in the metropolis, or in Dublin. Let him ask them to prepare for him
a statement of what they know by experience about the effects of med-
ical treatment upon the teeth, and hence upon the powers of masti-
cation-and digestion ; whether the drug system stands in any denned
relation to caries ; and whether, upon the whole, they regard Allo-
pathy as particularly favorable as a universal means of cure, to the
pearls of the woman's mouth, or the ivory array of the man's. And
just for the sake of science, let him summon the actuaries of a few
great insurance offices, to ask them whether any preference exists for
taking the policies of Allopathic over Homoeopathic patients ; or
which way the matter runs. It is obvious that the questions are
somewhat new, and could hardly be answered offhand ; but notice
might be given ; printed lists of queries sent round, and even inserted
by public advertisement in the journals; and in a little time, facts
would begin to arrange themselves round each query, and a well-
stored body of witnesses would come down to Westminster to Mr
Brady.
61. It will be better to manage the matter thus quietly, at a green-
o
34 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
covered board in the rooms of one of the long corridors of the new
houses, with a few pacific gentlemen, and Mr. Brady, speaking all
in unexcited voices, and the whole falling straightway into inevita-
ble shorthand, to germinate and grow into the thickest of the folio
blue books, which only a few heroic men guiding public, opinion will
master, rather than that so private a public question should go at
once, like the Corn Laws, to monster meetings, and perhaps to the
boards of Covent Garden out of the musical season. For many rea-
sons I should deprecate a direct appeal to the feelings of my Country-
men on the bleeding and drugging system. Only suppose a Homoeo-
pathic Cobden and Bright, appealing from an unwilling and deaf
Parliament to the mass of the nation, and instead of providing ample
accommodation for tenant farmers, holding out invitation and room
for ruined patients ; and what wild passions might, not such danger-
ous fellows evoke, what pangs might they not parade, what real
Stygian shadows might they not cause td shuffle and almost to flit
before the bleached audience ! We might easily have NO-PHYSIC RIOTS.
It might be a part of their tactics, that after the Homoeopathic Cob-
den, with the trenchancy of English sense, had carried the theatre with
him so far, some haggard wretch lately trebly bled should speak, and
the eloquence of his one pale sentence in faint whine would be ter-
ror. Then the fiery Homoeopathic Bright would fulmine, and he also
would announce on sitting down, that he had the satisfaction of intro-
ducing another patient : when straightway a throatless grave bird
with swelled chaps of dough, begins and ends his swampy croak with
" the calomel cure." The easiness of this kind of eloquence would
be shocking; those that were most unaccustomed to public speaking
would carry the audience the farthest: blanched and skeleton children
would have an effect quite disproportioned to their weight and color.
The coming together of the patients for such a purpose would be a
great inexpediency: flocking to a hospital, and shut in mass in its
receiving rooms, they are all going to secundem artem; but here they
are going to criticism, to complaint, to anger, and inevitable passion.
And remember that our new agitators would fly from town to town,
placarding, exciting, pathogogizing, printing tracts, collecting sub-
scriptions, publishing the Anti-drug- League, with the Anti-bleeding-
Supplement: rearing a formidable head in the Legislature itself, and
finally causing some Allopathic prime minister to apostatixe during the
next invasion of cholera, and overthrow terra finna under both parties
in the houses. For this reason it will be better for Parliament to
manage the case itself, never to let it lapse below the stateliness of a
committee, and the cold largeness of a Blue Book, but to collect
evidence in a still room of the long corridor, and then proceed to shut
up Allopathy by direct and clinching legislation.
62. As was the case with the Anti-Slavery Bill, it will be an im-
portant point for consideration whether the abolition of old physic
shall be immediate, or gradual. On this subject I should indeed be
sorry to prejudge and forestalKthe wisdom of Parliament. Yet I in-
cline for many reasons to suspect that the advocates of immediacy
will have the best of it. A principal ground is, that after the com-
mittee has concluded its labors, Allopathy, from what has been
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 35
proved of it, will be so thoroughly suspect, that every death which
takes place under it must necessarily become the subject of an in-
quest. And putting decease by old age out of the question, I have
received from an august authority a calculation, that for London
alone, in ordinary times, the sifting of the Bills of Mortality in that
case will occupy for twelve hours a day, every day in the year, ex-
cept Sundays, Forty Coroners and nearly five hundred coroners' jury-
men, besides several hundred chemists and pathologists, and barristers
innumerable. Mr. Wakley will be able to inform Parliament how in-
convenient this will be, from the experience which he has had in the
one or two unsuccessful inquests he held upon those who had died in
spite of homoeopathic treatment. It will therefore be better, the im-
mediate abolitionists will say, by direct and merciful action, to pre-
vent this unseemly overhauling of the allopathic Morgue ; which yet
must take place if any respite of years, or even weeks, be injudi-
ciously granted to the condemned system.
63. Mr. Brady's committee will have sad work enough in wading
through these rank fields of grief and pain, but their labors need not
all be on sorrows, though even then good hope would sustain them :
but let them for more reasons than one, interpolate their days of in-
quiry with investigations of a different order. Out of contrast, sight
shines. Let them invite evidence from the steady fathers and mothers
of families in which Homoeopathy has been practised for years, and
Jet them hear the condition of health in those homes. Let them ask
the parents whether the series of their "children's diseases" has in-
deed been treated without a grain of the ordinary physic : whether
teething has been accomplished without a case of lanced gums;
whether measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever have gone away
again without depletions and purgations : whether if the parents are
more recent converts to Homoeopathy, they have noticed any bettering
in the bodies of their little liocks since its adoption; whether in any
cases, chronic eruptions, that had resisted old treatment, and got worse
under it, and inveterate inflammations of the eyes, had yielded to
homoeopathic doses ; whether infants are less susceptible to these than
fanciful adults; whether the mental condition of their children, and
their sleep, which is the lake of which the days' states are the river,
have been more sweet and even than when drugs were put into their
bodies. I would also privately instruct Mr. Brady to direct some of
his cleverest questions to the Manchester side of the matter. How
have the medical expenses run? Is it, or is it not, a fact, that in
Allopathy one heavy bill engenders another ; that the year's charges for
calomel and bleeding are succeeded by the next year's heavier charges ;
and that in this way, after the Napoleonic maxim, war supports
war : but that in Homoeopathy, on the other hand, much cost is indeed
incurred at first in parrying the effects of the old treatment left upon
the system, in attacking the maladies of nature, and in steadily com-
bating constitutional predispositions; but after the first indispensable
assiduity of attendance is past, the medical expenses of the family
become as a general rule less and less, until at length many or the
whole of its members emerge from convalescence altogether, and pass
into the ranks of vigor and wholeness. Whether, in short, on the old
3G WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
system, the doctor's bill in unhealthy families does not generally in-
crease time after time ; and in the new system, decrease ? Whether
this, in conjunction with the diminished deaths under Homoeopathy,
the monetary gain to the community, of citixens saved, and funeral
expenses saved, be, or be not, a financial consideration of great im-
portance in the State ? Mr. Cobden, whom I hereby put upon the com-
mittee to intensify the arithmetic of Mr. Brady, will do good service
in extracting the marrow of this kind of questions.
01. I also regard the evidence of nurses as of much moment in
determining the length of the days of Allopathy. Good nursing is
a good part of the battle of Cure. Now nurses may be easily sum-
moned by Mr. Brady, who are accustomed to attend to both kinds of
patients — the homoeopathic and the other; and it will be edifying to
hear from their unscientific lips what they have experienced of the
two systems. Are the allopathic means a serious addition to the in-
evitable distresses of the sick room ; is its service dirty and disgusting
to perform ? Are blisters on children sad things to dress in the ab-
sence of the doctor? Is leeching a hard office, and are leech bites apt
to bleed too much, and to overdo the blood cure? Is the administra-
tion of bolus, pill and potion a thing they would gladly get rid of, or
the reverse; and are the discharges provoked by these drenches more
uncleanly than disease would have been without them? Is there a
large proportion of cases in which the excess of drugging and violent
means generally, revolts the patients and their friends, and causes
them to try a different mode of treatment? In childbirth, also, have
they any contrasted experience bearing upon the labors of the com-
mittee ? Are women, after their hour of sorrow, relieved of the con-
sequences of nature's struggle by the homoeopathic arnica, and is the
number of cases of puerperal fever small in such patients? Are they
better from the omission of the routine purge on the third day, with
which the Allopaths assist nature, who would rather be left alone in
that quiet-wanting time ? Are the quantity and quality of the mother's
milk better when she is not drugged ; and have they any facts to give
in their rough way, of the difference in the state of mother and child
under the two systems? I think Mr. Brady will find the evidence
of experienced and respectable nurses of great importance.
Go. The fact is, that nurses have a great many things put upon
them, which either ought, to be undone or the doctors ought to do
them for themselves. Many a medicine given to children is so chok-
ingly horrible that a medical practitioner ought to be present to count
the pulse and to watch the countenance during its administration ;
just as is properly the case at a military flogging. In my old days I
have seen a nurse resign the trembling spoon or cup to the doctor,
and say in the boldness of humane terror, " Sir, give it yourself." My
own conversion to homoeopathy was attended with one of these ex-
periences. Our eldest child, a baby then, was attacked in the night
with a sudden bronchitis, attended with great wheexing and oppres-
sion. My wife, and I sat on end in bed in sanitary conjugal quorum.
I ordered ipecacuanha wine as an emetic, and 1 went down stairs
to the surgery and fetched it. There it stood by the bedside, and
the question was, who should give it? My wife said nothing, and I
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 37
broke a short silence by observing that the medicine was there. She
then said, "Well!" and another silence ensued. I too now said,
" Well!" and again we were silent. At length Mrs. W. said, " What
are you going to do?" I said, " What are you going to do ?" She
said she was not going to give the child that medicine. I felt indig-
nant in all my professional frame, and I told her that the ordering of
medicine was the doctor's department, that it was the business of
mothers and nurses to give it. She replied that I was not only
doctor here, but also father and nurse, and that I must do it, or it
would not be done ; and she added also, that she had no faith in that
stuff; and furthermore that she was glad now that I had seen at
home what burdens were daily laid on parents and nurses when I
went away from house to house, leaving such things to be transacted
between my visits. I thought of the denunciation in the Gospel
against those who lay on grievous burdens, which themselves will
not touch with one of their fingers ; and I could not but admire her
disobedience. But she did not stop here ; but told me that for long
(she had hinted this before) she had felt a repugnance to all my prac-
tice, and that this very occasion was sent, partly to oblige me to look
into that new thing called Homoeopathy. The upshot of the parti-
cular case was, that my wife gave a piece of ipecacuanha, such as
would pass through the eye of a needle, to the child; and a good and
homoeopathic remedy it was ; after which, the oppression of the breath-
ing passed away. The circumstance made an impression on my
mind, and I now record it, being sure as day, that humble and sim-
ple as it is, it will leave a mark upon the minds of mothers. Think
then, mothers, fathers and nurses, what a blessing it is to you, to get
rid at one blow, of all these difficult and painful duties which the old
practice enjoins upon you! I see your own health and happiness
mantle and rise, as you look at your little ones from the bare contem-
plation of so good a riddance.
66. But if the application of the old means be an increase of evils
in the private sick room, what is it where the sick are congregated
together in hospitals, and above all on shipboard ? Aggregated masses
of disease are known to exert a baneful influence upon each individual
of the atfected groups, and this must be doubly the case where all
means are taken to aggravate the discharges that take place. In
acute cases, the whole vigor of the old system is directed to forcing
the morbid and morbific matters outwards, while Homosopathy gains
its chief triumphs by the extinction of the disease within the frame.
Of course, therefore, the allopathic method spreads all the loathsome-
ness of maladies under the very senses. And then, moreover, mark
the difficulty of attending to the artificially created wants of nature
in confined spaces. Supposing that measles break out in a ship
which has a large number of children on board, one child must have
an emetic for oppression of the chest; another, a blister for a more
advanced case of the same ; a third, leeches for pneumonia, with of
course calomel every two or three hours ; some too must be bled, and
each and all must be well purged many times in the treatment of
their cases. Is this nothing, repeated thirty or forty fold in the narrow
stifly berths of a ship, where at best, simply misery is triumphant ?
38 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
"What a different picture, Sir, and my Countrymen ! is the homcec*
pathic treatment of this same complaint! Pnt twenty drops of the
tincture of aconite, third dilution, quite tasteless of the aconite, into
a tumbler of water, and give a teaspoonful of it every three hours to
all those eases where there is fever: put twenty drops of tincture of
pulsatilla, third dilution, similarly tasteless, into a tumbler of \valer.
and give a teaspoonful at intervals of five or six hours, to all those
where there is but little fever, and the eruption is well out. Leave
all their tender bowels to themselves, only don't feed them too much.
If other symptoms arise, as pneumonia, don't bleed, don't purge, but
give aconite and bryonia — similarly tasteless, in alternation or suc-
cession : and so forth, according to each case. How clean and easy
is all this, and God knows it is most efficacious. It is as well done
on shipboard as on land ; and then neither in the medicaments nor
in the results, is the dirt of physic added to the dirt of disease. If
Parliament and Mr. Brady regard the sanitary condition of our emi-
grant ships as of public moment, I put this also to the labors of the
committee, as a matter well deserving their most earnest and Chris-
tian inquisition. And if I have the ear of any intending emigrants,
I conjure them to go out in no ship, without being provided with a
homoeopathic chest, and a book of directions for the treatment of sim-
ple diseases. And above all, I advise them to make constant inqui-
ries about the chartering of homoeopathic ships, which, as many of
the merchant princes of London are in the homeopathic ranks already,
is a measure which, with a little setting on foot, may be easily ac-
complished.
67. This brings me to the last part of my subject, which concerns
more particularly the so called sanitary movement of the day; and
now, Sir Benjamin Hall, and my Countrymen, I feel that I dm clos-
eted with you in an especial sense. For the present I leave Parlia-
ment to itself, and Mr. Brady to himself; and I shall be truly glad
if I have not to call them in to stimulate any of you in your inde-
pendent functions. If you will do what I dictate, by yourselves, you
shall have all the credit of it ; for I guaranty that I will tell nobody
out of your private circle that I have been the instigator. Sint sua
prcemia laudi.
68. Now first, Sir Benjamin, I beg to assure you, that you are not
presiding over a Board of Health at all in a medical sense. You are
the director of a mere Board of Cleanliness ; the administrator of an
edileship ; a noble function ; that to a community, and a town, or
group of towns, which washing, scrubbing, dusting, and putting
refuse away, is to a private house. The old medical profession has,
it is true, hoaxed you, after having hoaxed Parliament and Mr. Bra-
dy, into the belief that »you are a great medical oflicer, but then on
the face of it you have issued no medical directions; you have none
such in the background; and all your brightest measures resolve
themselves at once into the enforcing of public cleanliness. You
will understand me better as I proceed ; but in the mean time let me
say, that I honor you extremely in your office, which I believe to be
indispensable, and the creation of it a master proof that civilization
is advancing.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 39
69. But, Sir Benjamin, while your board is to the grand edifice
of material England what the mistress arid her servitors of house-
cleaning are to the private dwelling, a Board of Health will be to
the community what the medical man is to the family. He can
never confine himself, when summoned to specific cases, to explor-
ing the kitchen, or supervising the dusthole, which he expects to form
part of the daily work of the occupants ; though if any thing pecu-
liarly offensive strikes him, he will of course point it out to those
whose business it was to have seen to it without his criticism. But
what he does is, to medicate and diet his cases, certain distinct afflic-
tions of disease ; to prescribe the particularities of heat, cold, light,
air, which belong to those forms of sickness; to speak of moral and
mental treatment: and in short to cure the existing maladies. Now
just in the same way, that compound doctor, the Board of Health,
has to take measures for the collective sickness ; although any side
suggestions he may have to make to your Board of Cleanliness, will of
course be thankfully received; even if they somewhat reprove you for
not having mastered your own duties quite. "Dear me, ma'am,
there's a dreadful smell of cabbage water here!" would be a pretty
blow from a medical attendant to an English housewife who had a
sick child in bed in the room : and " Sir Benjamin, the drains of
Westminster are foul!" would no doubt grate upon you from the
Board of Health. This would be precisely because it would be your
business that was thus recalled to you by a foreign council.
70. The first business of a Board of Health, Sir Benjamin, in
1854, or in any other year you please, lies in issuing specific direc-
tions to the people of Great Britain and Ireland, for the treatment by
them of the early stages of any diseases that may be prevalent in
that or any other year. In every family there is such a thing as
domestic practice, a pennyworth of salts for this, of paregoric for that,
a little peppermint water for wind, and a little magnesia for stomach
aches. In Homoeopathy we have none of this ; but a wide range of
household healers. Now the Board of Health (recollect there is none
now) is the mother of Great Britain and Ireland in her administra-
tions of domestic preventions and remedies. It is obviously vthe
public doctor also, for medicine and maternity are seen to be one,
transfigured both on that high mount of charity and use.
71. Thus, Sir Benjamin, it is the business of the Board of Health
to seize upon the fact of the universal domestic practice, and to edify
and educate that practice to the farthest extent which the science of
medicine will allow, so that the first grappling of the public with
diseases may be as safe, sure and prompt as may be. Each season
has its own complaints, and the labors of such a Board will be in-
cessant, to publish in all convenient channels, first, the mode of pre-
vention and prophylaxis for the epidemy of the week or the month ;
and secondly, the best mode of treatment in the first or domestic
stages of the disorder. This will be a grand education for the medi-
cal men themselves, who will then for the first time become conscious
of how far they are quite clear in their views of simple disease, and
simple treatment: upon the principle that you understand well that
which you can exactly convey to others. It will also give the public
40 WAR, CHOLF.KA, AM) THK MIMSTRY OF HEALTH.
a medical education of the greatest use i<> the community, sharpen-
ing at once the appetite for health, and the axe to be laid to the root
of disease. In this way again it will exert a most vital influence on
the medical profession. For it is a principle that each calling is
driven into elevation, just in proportion as the whole community is
imbued with the spirit and knowledge of which the Professors are the
delegated guardians. Thus an educated audience exacts and rears
from its ranks refined orators, in whom the finish of the eloquence of
the assembly is brightly seen. A great agricultural people, if it have
chiefs in its own strong department, will force them to be men who
have no spitful of brute clods left in their creed, but to whom all the
ground is one manufactory of humane cultivation. An advancing
industrious race will demand of its stewards and overseers, more and
more brainwork, and less and less fatigue, as its busy wheels roll on.
And so a Great Britain and Ireland, medically educated in home
remedies, will, ex necessitate rei, drive up medicine and its colleges,
into broader common sense, into greater attention to curative results,
and into a wholesome fear of the public as its court of last appeal,
and ultimate judge. It will then be a real distinction to be a suc-
cessful medical man, because the palm will have been awarded by
those who are instructed in the merits of the case. The good doctors
will be Jaudati a laudatis.
72. This however is an oblique result, although we may easily see
that the case will be so, by what has already happened in your own
department, from the labors of your Board of Cleanliness. Even
now you have talked so much and so well with a humlred mouth-
pieces, of the necessities of drainage, sewerage, omnipresent waj:er
pipes for towns ; the permeation of clear streams of water through
them at moderate cost ; the formation of parks ; the forbidding of
mural dunghills and pigsties; and- the satisfaction of many low
needs, without which our highest social aspirations are abortive: even
now, I say, Sir Benjamin, you have so indoctrinated us all with these
exigencies, that a new realm of consciousness has been created in the
people : they take no sober Sunday walk to Hampstead without criti-
cizing ditches, mantled ponds and swampy lowlands ; they pass no
gully hole without thinking whether you are as good as your word
there, or not; and in short they are in the temper to appreciate what
you have done, and to thank you for it, and to force you, as you value
your position, to do more and more. Of course you rejoice in this,
— to be carried forward by your own clear will, and also whether you.
will or no, at the head of these clean legions of your countrymen.
You' are in the splendid -position of perfect necessity and perfect
freedom. You must scrub us harder, and bring us out whiter, every
month, or pay the piper. And now can you doubt that when the
healing consciousness has been developed by the Board of Health, as
the cleaning consciousness has been evoked by you, the medical pro-
fession also will be a new and higher head to its new population?
At present, you know, the case is not so : the old doctors tell as little
as possible to any body else : they are all wrapped up in long Greek
cloaks of technicalities, with black Latin dominoes and visors of
prescriptions: it is difficult to judge of them except by kill or cure,
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 41
which is too late : but let. the public light once get at them, let them
sometimes at least be dressed like other people, let them tell us for
our benefit what they know, and they shall willingly march at the
head of a force which has just confidence in its leaders. When once
they constitute a Board of Health, and quit disguises, they will
come into medical daylight, and the people of Great Britain and
Ireland along with them.
73. I know they are timid of this, and their eyes but little accus-
tomed to the public sun : moreover they are sadly, I will not say
basely afraid of losing much practice if they are only called in to diffi-
cult cases, when well skilled mothers find themselves at fault. I
never could participate in this fear, which if the worst were to come
to the worst, is a well of hope to every honest man in the kingdom.
The empire of disease any where abridged, makes all men richer in
that locality. Changes from a great demand for an article, to a small,
take place gradually ; there is always warning enough for the wise :
and the result is most wholesome, inasmuch as enterprise is created
every time a new direction is given to skill, by the cessation of an
old demand, and the rising up of a different one. I do indeed believe
that when Homoeopathy comes to be universal, and when the Board
of Health teaches the millions how to get all the good out of
it that the best knowledge will admit, fewer doctors will be required,
and those fewer will be rather physicians with insight, than men of
routine (for the mothers will easily have nearly all the routine) ; but
then in the social expansion which goes along with this, how many
new callings will come into being ; what ready ways of making
money there will be when once honest enterprise grows more freely in
the human heart ; and how little will a loss of function be regretted
by vigorous men. when they see that function admirably performed
bv fathers and mothers in every house. There is something pusillan-
*• *• OP
imous in the wail I often hear from the medical practitioners: "O
dear, there is that shocking .Mrs. Dunn who is cutting the ground
from under my feet with her abominable little Homoeopathic box."
Why, my man, you have no spirit, you are on no ground of your
own, or no such person could have interfered with you. Rely upon
it there is nothing less wholesome to the morality of a profession,
than to have a number of idlers in its ranks, people who could be
done without, and do something else for the nation : such a state of
things rots a calling: it is like a mob of Indian servants, one for the
right boot and one for the left, one for your pipe, one for each leg of
your three horses, one for your pocket handkerchief and one for your
punkah : you become an ill-served and languid wretch yourself, and
may well envy any English gentleman who eats, drinks, works, walks
and sleeps in the humblest self-dependence.
74. And now, Sir Benjamin, let me gird myself to the task of
giving you a specimen of the functions of the coming Board of
Health, which, however, as it does not yet exist, must for this time be
represented by myself. The present is the very best moment for ex-
emplifying the case; because, though medicine lies* buried in thick
night, war and pestilence lend ghastly torches, to display the want of
6
42 AVAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
public succor, by lifting up for a fold or two, the darkness which
shrouds the field of mortality and pain.
7-"). On the 14th of September, Sir Benjamin, the British army,
some 30,000 strong, landed on the coast, of the Crimea, and that
night, being without their tents, the whole force lay upon the ground
exposed to a drenching rain from sunset to sunrise. The consequence,
as T/ir Tinit'a states it, was a great increase in the maladies of the
soldiers, and a large number of fresh cases of cholera occurred. If a
Board of Health had been on that spot, in the general orders issued
from head quarters in the early morning, would have been comprised
this short direction to each man of the force: TAKE i:in s roxrco-
DEXDRON. This is because r/ius has a specific effect in preventing the
injurious consequences that come from thorough wettings. I am not
now speaking of a notion, but of a matter as well known to us Ho-
mrcopathists as the existence of the Bank of England. Rhns does
exert such a power. And I tell you that it is a shameful want, of
humanity, and of State Economy, not to adopt so simple a means of
insuring some little immunity to the brave men who go out. of this
land, in order to support its traditional grandeur, and by the very
reading of their sweet deeds heighten the moral stature of every man
who is left in it. Each soldier in that army ought to have had in his
knapsack a small medicine case, taking up a few square inches, and
of insignificant cost; and then the order, Take rhus, given by the
ambulant Board of Health, would have been executed in a moment.
An army would have been prescribed for, and cared for, and many a
death, and still more illnesses prevented. The same case, of thorough
wetting, is stated to have occurred to large masses of troops on the
niijht before the battle of Waterloo. What could the old practice
offer in such a case ? Why nothing at all, but to let the men get dry
again as they could. The calomel pills and senna draughts with
which they visit us at home for colds, were impossible. Here, then is
instance No. 1, in which Homoeopathy makes it possible for a Board
of Health to issue most benign instructions which can be carried out
if necessary for millions of patients at once ; and this, because it has
specific retrfedies on which all its members are agreed ; these, in so
compact a shape that they can be kept at hand whilst a waistcoat
pocket is left; and so efficacious, that they will never fail to save a
large percentage of lives; and so inoffensive, that in no case will
they enfeeble those who use them. I say, Sir, now, that Homeop-
athy comes to you as a statesman, knocks at the door of all the
wisdom and humanity that is in you, and beseeches you whether it
is worth a hearing: or whether your proud Board shall continue to
omit its name from your reports. By*heaven, Sir Benjamin, for the
sake of the hearts of those who are brave and firm for tne in that far
land, and for the hearts of wives and families they have left, behind
them, this thing, this Homoeopathy, this medical contempt, this God's
boon to the nations, with you, or in spite of you. shall have a hearing.
76. Your medical colleagues will try to laugh me off, and tell you
they did not know of r/tns in such a connection. Believe them there:
they know of no single feasible way of issuing one instruction bear-
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 43
ing upon the public health. But neither they, nor you, are the less
to blame on that account. When once you shut your eyes and heart
against any thing without examining it, if that thing professes to be
charged with a message of healing, you must take the consequences
of all that is lost by suc,h unhappy obstinacy ; and if the visitant who
comes to you in humble guise for the little bread and salt of your
best entertainment, happens to be an angel in rags, you have all the
guilt of shutting out the angel, though in that moment of your blind-
ness you only saw the rags. " He," Sir Benjamin, "who has done it
unto the least of these little ones, has done it unto ME." The Law
of England is at you here, as much as the Gospel of Christ. If a
man in a drunken fit, kills another, the drunkenness is no plea of ex-
tenuation. Nor when you and your medical circle committed your
first drunken act, of kicking out the modest person of Homoeopathy,
will any plea of ignorance save you. At least you knew very well
that you were not acting like reasonable beings: you knew that you
were condemning before hearing, and it is no excuse that you did not
know what vou were condemning. But I will tell you that the angel
•/
against which you slammed your door, had in his open hand, as a
present to you from the God of art and science, the health of millions
of millions.
77. In that same act, Sir Benjamin, you were also sinning against
the main experiences of this age. For you know very well that the
possessions that endow our civilization now, and carry us in point of
the material arts immeasurably beyond the ancients, have each and
all been received at first with the contempt and laughter of those
whom they came to serve. All these great facts, one after another,
have been stigmatized as impossible. Should not this at length have
taught you to put aside "impossibility," and betake yourself to hum-
ble learning and investigation ? Are statesmen to be always like the
dogs and cats, who are the same in the year 1 as in the year 50, re-
peating a continual lesson of public shame, and incapable of instruc-
tion by experience? Or will they learn at length that unlikelihood
and impossibility are two of the chief liveries which the new gifts
and dispensations of Providence wear to sightless eyes and unbeliev-
ing hearts ?
78. But we are now in the Crimea, Sir Benjamin, 'and if your
knees are not chattering with the cold you have caught, as " you did
not know of rhus toxicodendron," come on with me a few versts to
the south of the place of the first drenching. Lady Errol'is there,
and if she is not afraid, of course you and I are lions. It is the night
of the 20th of September: the plain in front of the River Alma, the
rocks, slopes, and heights beyond it, the plateau which stretches
away from the highlands, are covered with wounded soldiers of many
nations. They are covered too with dead men, but let them rest, for
they are gone to a better Board of Health. Again, the work of Great
Britain has been done ; a"^ain her sword hilts in its bloody scabbard,
double knighted in that day's fight. I hear the clear approbation of
the commander, the answering shout of the victorious legions, the
various noise of our twenty-eight thousand ; and also the groans of
the wounded and dying : but 1 hear nothing which appears to ema-
44 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
rate from the medical stall. Busy sailors, rough as boars in guise,
but making their corny, tarry hands like lambs' fleeces for the nonce,
arc doing all that penile women can do to remove the maimed
creatures to their ships: and assiduous surgeons are in the rear, ex-
tracting ."Minie balls, and lopping limbs: but, again, in the name of
heaven, who minds us all, \vhat general orders has the medical stall'
ive to meet so general and foreseen a disaster of wounds ? " O,
you say, "can nothing be done/'' Yes, most surely, Sir
Benjamin, something might have been done, if you and your circle
had not turned your faces away from Homoeopathy. Providence,
Sir Benjamin, foreseeing the strife of the human race, and that broken
li-.-ads, and pierced bodies, and shattered limbs would be as regular a
part of man's history as any other diseases, has sown upon His
thousand mountains, a yellow-flowered plant called armed, which is
by Him commissioned with properties, to heal the wounds inflicted in
battle, and to stay many of the sad e fleets of violence upon the life
of His quarrelsome children. And had there existed one gentle
Bishop of Health in the British Government, eaeh man of that noble
arrny would have had this arnica in his knapsack, included in the
little case I mentioned before; or perhaps put sttll more handily, in
some side pocket near his heart, in order that if he were struck down
for his country, he might reach out his languid fingers, and find that
his country had thought of his wounds before they were inflicted, and
done its best to stanch them. The general orders before the battle
would have contained these words : Take arnica if hurt. After the
battle hundreds of men could be served with it in a few minutes, if
they were incapable of taking it themselves ; and mark this, Sir
Benjamin, as a well-known fact ; those men who had it would take
comparatively little harm if left upon the ground, as must inevitably
be the case with many after great shocks of armies. The Board of
Health must answer at the bar of Britain and of God, for having
neglected this easy and powerful means of succoring wounded men.*
True, " they did not know of arnica ; " but that again was because
in their pride they would not know of Homoeopathy. Here then is
instance No. 2, in which the old practice can offer no shadow of a
measure of public health in a great public emergency; and in which
""""Homoeopathy comes forward with the very thing which is wanted. I
told you you should hear something presently about Hahnemann, and
this is a little part of the something.
79. But, perhaps, you will tell me that I have torn you to the Cri-
mea somewhat rudely ; that you had no business there ; but that a
certain piece of warm green baize is the place of your dominion ; and
that you have nothing to do with omissions and misfortunes which
* Mr. Headland informs me that when the army was starting for the East, he
made an offer through a hi<rh personage, to the Government, to furnish, at his own
cost, any number, say one thousand, of small bottles of arnica, to be distributed
amon<r the common soldiers. Many of the officers of the Fusileers provided them-
selves with this irrand wound medicine. Mr. Headland's offer was taken no notice
of. It was l/'i,-!;c:l by the medical authorities. Some time there will be a judg-
ment on back parlors, and the trumpet psalm of that day will contain the text :
" The dark places of the earth are full of cruelty.'-'
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 45
happen 3000 miles away. Sir Benjamin, you are the accredited
centre of the public health department of the^e realms; and your in-
fluence as such radiates throughout the circle of the British domin-
ions. Have you, or have you not, done your best to close all your
avenues against the very name and thought of Homoeopathy? Are
you not willingly associated with a packed board of doctors at which
Homoeopathy is entirely unrepresented ? If this be so, then you
have lent all your weight, which is that of the highest health officer
in this country, positively Minister of Public Health, to a plan which
has choked out of public life all the fair offices which Homoeopathy
would have performed for our wounded soldiers. But if you still
plead not guilty, because there is the distance of 3000 miles between
the cause and the effect, between the comfortable head quarters and
green baize, and the gashed soldier's bloody turf by the River Alma,
what then have you to say of the cholera, which has been quite in
Westminster?
80. Sir Benjamin, you have had 12,000 cholera deaths within the
compass of your immediate throne, principally in the heart of London.
You had ample notice that that enemy was advancing upon you in.
broad lines from the* European coasts. The time of its arrival, and
the strength of its assault, were foretold with something of scientific
exactness. What preventive measures did you and your Board take,
to meet the enemy ? Belonging as you do to a little medical Russia,
you knuckled down to fate like arrant MenchikofFs. You wrote lead-
ers in The Times on pure water, drains, and town decency, and in-
trenched yourselves in a most respectable recommendation to the
sweetest cleanliness. For the rest, if the plucky foe will land, he
must, and if he will kill our people, he must. The result is, Sir
Benjamin, that there are 12,000 cholera dead on your field, and God
only knows how many wounded — how many convalescents who
will never be busy men or women again in this world. I suppose
you did not know of a substance called cuprum (copper) administered
in Homoeopathic doses as a preventive against cholera ; and I sup-
pose you did not know of another substance termed veratrum, also
similarly and complementarily preventive. Had you and your medi-
cal grand chancellery known enough of your professed business to
advert to these two gifts of God, a few' thousand slips of paper half
as big as one of these pages, would have saved you reams of printing
about meteorology and fungi, and the public would have blessed your
name for cancelling the pestilence, or better still, they would have
thought little about either you or it, and you would then have been
more than content with an inner blessing of satisfaction from the
Great Physician of us all. But now I must tell you about these pre-
ventives, to make you know them. A few globules of Homoeopathic
cuprum, Sir Benjamin, and the like of veratrum, given alternately, —
the copper one morning on rising, and the veratrum the next, will
save a great portion of the population from attacks of cholera, and
those who still have the disease, will take it far more mildly; much
as is the case with vaccination as prophylactic against small pox.
There is abundant evidence to this effect. Not a man who* takes
46 AVAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OP HEALTH.
these substances in the Homoeopathic form, is worsened or laid up
for a moment by their administration, He feels nothing bodily; but
then he does led an immunity in his mind from the gripe of the dis-
: and this alone is a signal safeguard against its invasion. The
first ellect of the medicine is to kill fear, which is a vast cause of
cholera attacks at a time when the disease is prevailing. As this is
so, think what you have done in giving the cold shoulder to Homoe-
opathy! 12,000 dead in London: 12,000 sailors and soldiers dead
in the Black Sea and the Baltic ! Is not this an affair of the Stale ?
The demolition of myriads of civic arms; a myriad hands rotting
away in a few nights from the sailor's cutlass and the soldier's sword !
And then the families of the dead! And most marvellous of all,
nothing proposed or thought of by you and your Board, that had not
been tried, and its outer incapacity pro\&ed, in many previous inva-
sions of the same disorder! And yet more marvellous still, the only
alleged preventive, never so much as mentioned in your jaunty re-
ports, which are full of fine matters for British associations and ab-
stract philosophers ! matters of the same moment to io-day's panic-
stricken, and pestilence-stricken, as Lord Rosse's researches among the
nebula;, or Mr. Layard's explorations of the title deeds in the cellars
of Sennacherib. Sir, you are costing the country a pretty penny, in
disabled industry, and maimed and crippled expeditions, just because
you choose to live in the midst of a dense fog and night of doctors,
to whom Homosopathy is anathema marantha. But let me here
again point out to you, that they had nothing to propose to meet the
case; their science lay in opening the nation's bosom to fate: and
furthermore, that this Hornreopathy you have flouted, is the only ser-
vant which the State has in face of the calamity, and for political as
well as all other reasons must come for adoption to the Government
of this country, either in spite of you, or the reverse, just as you
please.
81. And what did you and the packed Board do when the cholera
came ? Why. you became, by self-appointment, Clerk to the Fates,
and registered each snip of their scissors. The cut threads of life
were chronicled and tabulated, and a splendid directory of dead men,
a blue book of the last arrivals in the other world, was your proudest
achievement. All this is admirable in itself, when regarded as a lit-
tle side play of science, accompanying the performance of your grave
duties. You did it, and you ought to have done it ; but you ought
not to have left the other thing undone. Here also you murdered
Homoeopathy ; you dashed the chalice out of the hand of the heal-
ing angel ! If you had had any general medical instructions to com-
municate, they would surely have come forth at such a time ; but
like Charles X., who was sparrow shooting at St. Cloud when he
lost his throne and his Swiss in Paris, you were out fungus hunting
when cholera was decimating your own subjects in London. The
perfecting of the cloaca maxima and all the little cioacte was still
your pet plan in the emergency ; and you thought that if you could
kill the smell of dead and dying by chloride of lime, the unmannerly
corpse«would no longer come between the wind and your nobility.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 47
You and The Times could go to your pillows well after so great a
sacrifice to the human conscience! I must however rouse you from
your opium.
82. I suppose you did not know of camphor* given according to
homoeopathic directions in the first moments of cholera. It is not
my professed object here to instruct you or my other countrymen in
the treatment of this disease : my observations on that head are only
incidental, for the purpose of displaying for wholesome and most
charitable ends to you and all, the dereliction of you and the packed
Board in a national case of dire distress: also, to exhibit to you in a
small specimen, what the labors of a Board of Health shall be. Well
then next time, Sir Benjamin, this Board of Healing will order thirty
drops of saturated spirit of camphor to be put in half a tumbler of
spring water, and a teaspoonful to be taken every hour as soon as the
diarrhoea commences, and long before the doctor can arrive ; and to
be taken every half hour, every ten, every five minutes, according to
the intensity of the symptoms. Let absolute recumbency, and ab-
stinence from food, be also general orders. If the disorder increases
after two or three hours (two or three according to intensity), mix
twenty drops of tincture of veratrum, n. 3, in one half tumbler of
water; twenty drops of tincture of arsenicum, n. 3, in another: and
give a teaspoonful of each alternately every half hour. Should the
patient be deathly cold, give in teaspoonfuls iced water, or water as
cold as can be had. Mix also at the same time, in another half tum-
bler, twenty grains, or as much as will lie on a farthing, of cuprum,
tritu ration, n. 3 : and if cramps and convulsions are a prominent
symptom, give a teaspoonful of this whenever the pain seems most
intolerable : keeping on also with the other medicines. If death ap-
pears to be setting in after these remedies have been administered for
some hours, don't budge an inch in hope, but give in the same way
as the veratrum, carbo vegetahilis, tincture, n. 3 ; and in two hours, if
no better, alternate it with stramonium, tincture, n. 3. By the time
this has been done, the homoaopath will have arrived, and in thou-
sands of cases to patients rescued from the grave.
83. Have you recommended or tried any of these healers? No.
Have they been tried on a great scale by the homoeopaths, and are
* It is well to be recorded that Napoleon III., Emperor by the grace of God and
the will of the French people, knows of camphor in cholera. He has ordered from
Headland's 500 bottles of camphor tincture. As this might have been easily made
in France, lor camphor and alcohol are articles little adulterated, and easily mixed,
it is to be presumed that that sagacious and determined Emperor gave the order to
show good will to Homoeopathy. We read in the Pays of Oct. 25, as one proof "of
the deep solicitude felt by the Emperor and the Government for the welfare of the
Army/' that " the Emperor has sent to the General-in-Chief of the Army in the
East, a considerable number of small bottles containing a preservative against the chol-
era." These are, without doubt, Headland's very camphor ; though the Pays ap-
parently dare not mention Homoeopathy to ears polite. The Emperor knows that
Marshal St. Arnaud owed that lease of life which enabled him to be at the Battle
of the Alma, to the homoeopathic instrumentality of Dr. Charge of Marseilles, into
whose hands as a dying man the Marshal went long ago. Homoeopathy set him
up for a time ; but his constitution was undermined, and he sank under the cam-
paign in the Crimea His letters are published, in which he gives his unqualified
testimony in favor of Homoeopathy.
48 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
they fixed facts now, and no experiments ? With a thousand
tongues from all climates, Yes, and again, Yes! Minister President
of the health of Great Britain and Ireland, grand educator of sound-
ness of body to the most important, community now on earth, distrib-
uter of orders for the general tactics of English, Scotch, and Irish in
the face of pestilence and epidemics, I suppose you did not know of
these things! Perhaps also you will tell me that sudi general orders
may indeed easily be issued, but that the public will not carry them
out At least, Sir Benjamin, you and the packed Board have not
tried. And besides it is your business, or that of a Board of Health,
whose name your board of cleanliness usurps, to instruct the people
in the ways and means of keeping their bodies whole ;* to chastise
their apathy by your flagrant appeals ; and by propagating examples
of the success of your measures, to win the nation to attend to your
manifestoes. The Board of Health will have the same career to run
as a single good physician ;'it is not to whine because it has its own
way to make ; the patients of course have little confidence at first :
then a cure comes : then a sunshine of confidence spreads from it :
then many cures, and the confidence becomes larger, and at last na-
tional, and the attention to every direction of the Board immediate.
And 4f there is to be compulsory vaccination, why not something of
the same kind with regard to prophylactics (preventives), and medi-
cines for actual disease ? The tax gatherers might easily be made
instrumental here; and the sting of their unpopularity be drawn: the
"great plague of London V might be made the means of lessening its
great pestilences. Why should they not give slips of paper with di-
rections something like those I have detailed, which by their reitera-
tion might bite into the public mind ? Why not have the directions
printed on the very papers that demand and receipt our imposts, that
so some of the strength taken out of the hand one way might be re-
covered to it by anticipation in another? Horse leeching the people
is not the only function of a Government: you might have partly
cancelled that severe portion by the blessed office of giver of health.
* Apropos of the medical education of the community, we shall find that under
tjoma-opathy it begins with early childhood, and is continued throughout life. The
little people of families in which our simples are given, get to know easily and
soon what has done them good in their minor ailments, and the remedies thus
learned, and which constantly accumulate, are indelibly stamped upon the memory.
By the time when such families settle in life, they have acquired an amount of do-
mestic medicine which is highly useful to them. I know by experience that this
is the fact. Moreover in this way persons come to be very exactly acquainted
with those homa-opathic medicines that suit their particular constitutions. And
when once careful and clever mothers have seen their children's diseases treated.
and have learned the successful medicines, (which I am always happy to tell them,)
if those diseases recur, they treat them themselves often with complete success.
Frequently I have seen bronchitis in children thus cured in a manner which I
should have been proud to achieve in my much regretted allopathic days. Nor do
I apprehend danger from mothers' tampering with disease be)-ond their skill : this
may be the case sometimes under any system; but the solicitude of mothers as a
general rule sends them quite soon enough to the doctors. Of course it is an obvi-
ous truth, that when a medical man is once called in. he should take the reins, and
have no interference; but his power of managing this depends upon his own moral
and medical standing.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 49
84. With the British Army, which is under your charge, for it sits
under the shadow of your professed medical influence, you have had
a grand opportunity of carrying out whatever I have described.
When that noble army embarked, there were a series of calamities
known to you and the packed Board, which were as sure to happen
to the men as the courses of nature are sure. I must take you to
each of these, in order that you may see what you did, when you
gave Homoeopathy the go-by. The first was seasickness on a great
scale, and for a long duration. What general directions did you
issue to meet this general and inevitable mischief ? You let the
men get well again unaided, as soon as they could : they were left to
the laughter of unsick companions. Had you chosen to know of
Homoeopathy, the first use of the small medicine chest that each man
of the force would have had with him, would have been made here.
There would have been, before embarkation, general orders to every
man to take nux vomica, three globules dry on the tongue, because
this prepares the nerves to resist the tossing of the sea. Next, when
all were on board, orders would have been given for those who are
not seasick to give their less fortunate comrades in their intervals of
comparative repose, three globules of ipecacuanha, which is of course
homoeopathic to sickness. By a steady perseverance in this plan for
a few hours, a vast number of cases would have ceased, and some of
the men would have taken their first lesson in administering medicine
to their fellows, and the sick would have received their first confi-
dence from its success. By this means, Sir Benjamin, you would
have established a footing, many of our jolly fellows would begin to
cease laughing at Homoeopathy, and you would gradually pave the
way for your practice. The soldiers and sailors would believe in
their globules with the same trust which they have in their Minie
balls. There would of course be a residue of several obstinate cases
for the surgeons, which they would treat in the same way, with coc-
culus, petroleum and tabacum, according to circumstances and symp-
toms ; ordering the comrades to administer these medicines also.
By the time you arrived in the Dardanelles, the whole expeditionary
force would have got the germ of a soldier's medical education, and
the next steps would be more easy. The number of doctors' cases
would have been greatly diminished for the next long voyage, as a
considerable proportion of the force would now know well enough
the whole routine of the treatment of seasickness. Would they be
worse soldiers on that account, or less efficient servants of her Majes-
ty the Queen and the British nation ? I opine what the answer will
be from her Majesty, and from every man of us.
85. And now, Sir Benjamin, as health minister, had this affair of
seasickness nothing to do with your department? And tell me fur-
ther, has any other thing than Homoeopathy ever pretended to issue
general prescriptions for such a case ? If not, does any thing com-
pete with it for the appointment of state medicine ? I have indeed
heard of the allopaths ordering blisters to the stomach in inveterate
cases, after the Pharmacopoeia had been administered ; but how
would this read in general orders ? You know how it would read.
I challenge the allopaths to make any manifesto for the occasion.
7
50 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
They will rightly smile at the bare thought of being the depositaries
of so benign a power.
86. We are now together in Turkey, and our still undiminished
30,000 have a number of minor ailments partly traceable to the cli-
mate, and partly to their new conditions. These are more or less
epidemic, because like causes produce like effects when applied to
large masses of men. The Board which is to be, prescribes for
them also in general orders, to the great delight of the medical
men, who have only the residue of difficult cases to manage. For
observe that the army doctors, prejudice against Homoeopathy apart,
would be glad to have their practice thus reduced to real doctors'
cases, while civilian doctors at home dread such a curtailment. This,
you note, is a matter of pay. But I do not delay at this stage. Let
us go on to Varna, where the 30,000 are to be exposed to fever.
You are clairvoyant, Sir Benjamin ; I no sooner mention the spot
than you are there, just like Mrs. Wagstaft", or Mr. Hammond's
Emma ; you see the men already struggling in the dim folds and
coils of vaporous fevers. What did you do for this general calamity,
into which the brave 30,000 walked as surely as if they had waded
into a Stygian river, which lay direct across their march ? You saw
them going in knee-deep: you knew that many would go overhead.
What did the Health Minister do ? They had to go there, be it ob-
served, and British soldiers, and French soldiers, go through death as
they ford any other river. You did nothing ; and trammelled with
the packed allopathic Board, you could do nothing. If you had
then been a clear King of Health, higher in vigor by a whole head
than the best among us, and if you had had your staff' of faithful
healers in all the armor of Homoeopathy around you, you would
have ordered bryonia alba, three globules, and rhus (our old friend),
three globules, on each alternate three hours, as a commencement to
all those who felt certain symptoms of indisposition. Thus you
would have lessened the number of doctors' cases to such an extent
that the regular staff' of medical men would have been quite competent
to treat them ; and we should have saved very many lives, and have
heard less about the paucity -of medical servants. Alack ! the allo-
paths, who have no general directions to give, were all about you :
the Army and Navy, and State Medicine, Homoeopathy, was again
rudely pushed away. It has, Sir Benjamin, been most triumphant
against these fevers from the Mississippi to the Ganges ; it has immeas-
urably beaten all the calomel and all the quinine on their own fields ; it
has robbed and bearded death in many a swamp and jungle ; it has in-
jured no constitution and retarded no convalescence ; yet it was not
respectable enough, not to the taste of the flunky Times enough, to
be allowed to rescue our poor fellows on the morasses of the Euxine.
87. Here then you lost another opportunity, not only of saving
life, but of building up what I must call for want of happier English,
military domestic medicine, — words which involve rather a sad paro-
dy for the homeless soldier. Perhaps you also lost the opportunity
of treating and converting the Duike of Cambridge and the Prince
Napoleon, whose suffrage would have counted beyond price with the
troops when they gave their loud voices for Homoeopathy. But let
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 51
bygones be bygones ; only remember that we have furthermore al-
ready found you equally in complete voidance of your Health Min-
istry, in the cholera on land and at sea, in another perhaps heavier
bout of seasickness, in the drenching of the 14th of September, and
on the sanguinary field of the Alma. I wonder how much your Im-
perial Allopathy has cost the country by the 21st of December! what
we have paid old Physic for the shrug of the shoulders with which it
motioned Homoeopathy down stairs from the green baize table. The
beauty of Helen cost the Trojan war, and the beauty of Allopathy
well nigh cost us the loss of the expedition to the Crimea; for you
know very well that the blow of cholera nearly took the wind out of
our mighty armada. Are you, then, not the Minister but the Czar
of Health, that you estimate men as so much carrion in the making ?
Well, let that pass ; and let us hurry on to Balaklava.
88. Now I find you are excessively tired at the end of that day's
march ; hill, and rock, and steep descent, swamp and forest, have told
upon you ; and you are footsore, and sore all over. So am I. So
also are myriads more. Now as you and the said myriads require
prompt attention, what are the general orders of the King of Health
to his wearied subjects ? What is there that is perfectly harmless,
easy to take without any preparation, comprisable in a word at the
end of Lord Raglan's orders, and quite valid for the bruises of
fatigue ? Allopathy, art thou a dumb dog when thy counsel is
needed ? Canst thou not answer one question of thine examina-
tion in general usefulness ? Dost thou leave the bruised on the march
to get unbruised again as best they may? And is the Health Minis-
ter, thy master, dumb also ? The men have to work hard to-morrow,
as if they had not been fagged down to-day ; and if thou canst take
away the concussion of the march, thou mayest advance by some
hours and days the siege of Sebastopol. But thou art a deaf mute:
and I must do the voice for thee. Let each man of the force take
arnica again, and let him repeat it four times a day as long as his
severe toil lasts, which will be throughout the siege. By this means, his
extraordinary exertions will do him less harm : if his feet are almost
WQunded with marching, inflammation will be stopped at the begin-
ning; and if his hands are blistered by carrying sand bags, gabions,
fascines, and helping heavy guns up, the blister will be a common
blister, and will go no further. A host of ordinary cases will be can-
celled by this simple means : an army, two armies, will have learned
the use of arnica and the ready way of making the least of all the
lesions of over-fatigue : and whatever cases are over and above, the
doctors, released from a vast amount ,ot work that no longer belongs
to them, can treat with rhus (a complement vulnerary to arnica), and
then after that the armies will have learned the use of rhus too, and
can release the doctors from another circle of cases.
89. Does this strike you as of any importance, Sir Benjamin, or do
you aid and abet The Times in bolting the door against it ? If so,
what is your proposition ? I see that the insufficiency of the medi-
cal staff to meet the wants of the casualty patients, is the subject of
beautiful leaders in the Leading Journal, which will not lead the con-
tributors to its fund to expend any of their <£200 checks upon arnica
52 AVAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
and rhus. But here Homoeopathy has the small sharp end of its
wedge in, which shall be driven right home into the biscuit heart of
The Times. This disproportion between doctors and patients is an
incurable fact for it: the old system cannot mend it: Dr Secundum
Artem must himself die before the matter can be set right, for it
originates in the impossibility under which Dr. S. A. lies, of issuing
any general plan of treatment. Medication by single specifics is the
only salvation from it. The plan of the old system under a similar
case at home happening to an individual, would consist in prescribing
rest for some days : saturnine lotions on legs laid up on chairs for
swelled feet: purges for inflammatory symptoms : but this plan is
inapplicable here. The plan of Homoeopathy is the same at Bala-
klava as it is in Westminster: take arnica repeatedly, and use it ex-
ternally if you can: if not, persevere with it internally. You will
be on parade for the morning gun, and if stiff, you will still be safe ;
and you will go cheerily on and about until the fortress capitulates.
90. The fault then of your Board is, that it can give no general
orders, and can make no use whatever of the brains of the troops to
enable them to be its assistants in the medical work ; in consequence
of which the soldiers are medically just as little informed of their
part at the end of a campaign or twenty campaigns, as they were
when they left the Waterloo Bridge Station. They say that a man
is either a fool or a physician at forty, but the poor trooper, if he at-
tained the age of Methuselah, would on your present way of dealing
be a medical fool as long as he lives. A strange Russian jealousy
this, in the old system : it can't attend the people when struck down
with the spiked truncheon of the accidents of war ; and it won't
teach them to help themselves. The dog in the manger, rampant,
shall be the arms of the packed Board from henceforth.
91. But this jealousy has another ramification ; it opposes the em-
ployment of many instructed assistants of both sexes who are not
decked with a medical diploma. Considering that the diploma
people have done nothing in the way of general orders and mani-
festoes of health and healing, and that 12,000 deaths in the Black
Sea by pestilence are the result, I really cannot see the danger of
allowing irregular practitioners to intervene.* The irregularity of a
smaller mortality might have come of it : a new turn might have
been given to the statistics. There is not surely on this earth a man
# Hear what DR. ELLIOTSON says in The Zoist about this balance of evils.
" When a doctor is called in, his doings may be extremely hazardous and fraught
with the possibility of unmitigated evil. He may bleed, and physic, and mercuri-
alize, and insLst upon low diet, and give stuporifics when he ought to do none of
these things, and m;ay cause the patient to grow ten times worse, and, at last, to die.
He may give meat, strong soup, wine, brandy, or porter when these are all perni-
cious. He may give bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter : and moreover may tor-
ment the patient, perhaps a little innocent sensitive child, with useless blisters,
moxas, issues, setons, hery liniments, incessant nauseous draughts, and cruelly
harass the poor creature woo is unfortunately in his power through poverty, or, as
is very common among all ranks, through ignorance of his incapacity, — an ig-
norance which renders innumerable patients infatuated with the grossest block-
heads who were ever licensed to practise and do mischief ' impune per totam ter-
rain.' Such objections are absolute twaddle."
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 53
so brazen (out of the immediate vicinity of Printing House Square)
as to affirm or even to surmise that more could have died.
92, I propose then, Sir Benjamin, to open the gates of physic
somewhat, and to have non-commissioned officers of healing, and
rank and file of healing. Let them consist of volunteers, of whom
many thousands will forthcome. Let them all be provided with,
homoeopathic cases, a little more ample than those which the soldiers
possess ; and let it be a part of their agreement that they will faith-
fully inform themselves, on a few general points of treatment which
the Ministry of Health will direct: that is to say, the first things to
be done for cholera, fever, seasickness, influenza, over-fatigue, wounds ;
and so forth. This will be easy to them. For I beg you to remark,
that in Homoaopathy the practice of healing to this extent is an ex-
ceedingly simple matter ; to the last degree unmysterious ; in short,
there is hardly an old lady in Christendom of average understanding,
who cannot be very serviceable in it. Thousands of families already
manage thus much at home; and with the instructions of the Min-
istry of Health daily given them in Lord Raglan's shortest sentences,
they will do it even better in the Crimea. On the old plan, the prac-
tice in such a case cannot indeed be said to be difficult, because it/ is
flatly impossible, and even unthought of. But then the new, Sir
Benjamin, is the creature of a different hope and day, and belongs
to the realm of a more practical sun !
93. But then the doctors shiver out, "^Only think of the body of
quacks and irregulars that will be let loose upon the community when
the army, with its impedimenta, comes home again: we shall be pushed
from our stools." What then ? If you all die out, not more than 65
per cent, or 12,000 in gross in London, will die of cholera on its next
visitation. I see no danger impending, which has not been impend-
ing and striking for long ages. But then they shiver out again,
u Only think of having as competitors the conceited nurses of the
Crimea, — flushed with victory over wounds and pestilences, — popu-
lar as women alone, and good and brave women can be, — the centres
of listening circles, — the admirations and oracles of tea tables;
we shall not have a chance, even had we diplomas from all colleges,
against these medical Amazonians." There is some reason in this
objection, which points indeed to a new state of things. In the Battle
of the Alma, a certain Russian general officer was captured by troops
of the Guards, and he is said to have informed his captors that he
could put up with that fate, but could not so well have borne to be
made prisoner by those petticoats, meaning the Highlanders. He did
not know what hearts beat under Scotch plaid, or what steel sinews
Highland petticoats cover. And the medical Russians of this country
are just as much out with regard to petticoats generally. They have
no idea what woman can do with her round arm of healing. Woman,
Sir Benjamin, in this country, is the pillar of Homcsopathy; she first
saw the horrors of the old system in her own nursery among her
loved ones : she first has experienced the blessings of the new. It
was she that emancipated the slave : it will be she that ultimately
rescues the Briton from the crooked and venomous darts of physic.
She will then enter upon one of her own callings from which she has
54 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
too long been excluded. In all respects one half of medical practice
belongs to Homoeopathic woman. Only note her qualities. The first
of these is intuition, the bird's eye of her ever busy love. With this
she marks symptoms and bodily states in those she sincerely tends,
with such an anticipation of correctness as no physician can safely
disallow. Were this intuition fixed and educated, it would readily
pass into stable medical insight. Her fine senses animated by this,
might soon eclipse the corresponding organism in the man in sev-
eral fields of diagnosis. Take the diseases of the heart and lungs,
and I have no hesitation in affirming that the woman's educated ear
might carry the knowledge of these as matters of hearing far beyond
the point at which it at present stands. . She might be taught all
matters of common diagnosis in these complaints with great rapid-
ity ; and I believe a time is at hand when all good mothers will know
them. As to practice, Homoeopathy has distinctly opened it to
woman. So united are all God's gifts, so much do they converge
to one another and to higher principles common to them all, that this
man Hahnemann, without having that end in view, has done more
than any one else perhaps towards the emancipation of woman, by
providing her with a field of the most humane and artistic usefulness,
in which her beautiful powers can expand. It is a great thing for
any thing when new blood comes into it ; and the newer the blood
the less bounded is the hope. What then may we not augur for medi-
cine, when an entire better half is added to it; when the Lady Hygeia
is really in practice. I should expect at least a set of observations
quite novel in their nicety, and of remedial touches delicate beyond
compare. The appearance of woman upon the world's stage as a
healer belongs to the present hour, and in its breadth was impossible
before Homoaopathy came. She can have no material function with
old physic, which shuts itself up in the frowning walls of dead
languages and rank male diplomas. Providence has kept her hands
white of it until this time : and in those pure hands she now receives
from Him a principle of guidance and a set of remedies that will not
soil them. The keen edge of this wedge also is in, and it will be
driven home. War and pestilence are the Thor's hammers that will
send it into the core of physic.
94. Was ever common sense more clear than that women are the
proper nurses for wounded soldiers? Why they should have been
excluded beats all reasonable conjecture. The ladies of Antwerp and
Brussels ministered to thousands of such after the Battle of Water-
loo. Women, by their patient virtues and powers of endurance, are
quite competent to follow an army in the field; they always stood as
a second array at the back of the old Teutonic hosts; nay, in disor-
derly crowds they have followed all armies since wars were made.
Why should they not now follow in well-appointed bands of charity ?
And for another thing, why should they not be instructed in homoe-
opathic medicine, receive certificates of competency so far, take more
and more work from the overburdened shoulders of the medical man,
and emancipate the attention of the doctors for the worst cases and
the most dangerous casualties ? Because the doctors are timid of
bringing such rivals into the field afterwards ? At any rate, by shut-
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 55
ting out the other sex from a participation in their labors, they have
taken so much upon themselves that the work is not performed at all,
according to the unanimous testimony of all impartial eye witnesses.
It appears then, that of necessity laymen must come in, women must
come in ; and to make the best of both these newly-enfranchised
classes, Homoeopathy must come in, and teach what to do, and how
to do it. This is God's wedge of Fate.
95. This reform has many nuclei, — little centres from which the
newness is growing, nor perhaps will it end until Doctresses are prop-
erly seated in all our large communities. A beginning has been
made in the United States, and by two highminded English ladies,
who have each passed through an entire curriculum of medical stud-
ies, and taken doctors' degrees. I allude to Doctor Elizabeth and
Doctor Emily Blackwell, both of whom I have the honor of knowing
personally. From Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell I received the affecting
tale of her struggle. Before I had the pleasure of meeting her, I was
accustomed to smile at the notion of female physicians, and I was
imbued with the prejudice, that the art of healing was not intended
for women. But when I met her, I received the confutation of my
hypothesis; and I saw at once that where one such lady could exist,
two could exist, and in short that she was the model and the prophecy
of medical ladies. She is now in practice in New York, — not, I
grieve to say, a Homoeopathist ; but I am thankful for her as a pres-
ence in medicine at all. She told me that she had long determined
to open medicine to her sex, and to recognize no difficulties but as
they came. She applied to various colleges for permission to attend
the courses of lectures, but always with the result of polite refusal.
At last a college in Philadelphia opened to her solicitation. The day
on which she was to take her place in the class, the Professor told his
students that a lady was about to join their ranks, and he hoped well
of them for her sake and for their own. There she continued, assid-
uous in all departments ; she did her part in the dissecting room like
the rest, only, I have no doubt, with a grave and reverent perseverance
that was difficult to equal; and at last she went up for her examina-
tion, passed it, and took her degree. When she left college, the Pro-
fessor again addressed his class ; he acknowledged that his admoni-
tions had been honorably fulfilled, and that never before had he known
within those walls so thorough an obedience to decorum. And he
added that for this cause, he should always be glad if he could have
such ladies among them. Imagine, Sir Benjamin, what a threatening
filmy mob of Times papers and nickering Punches such a woman as
that walked through without knowing it, with her quick unswerving
resolution. I think you will admit she might have nerve on a medi-
cal emergency, and be entitled to prescribe with a cool head what she
had learned with so much labor, and was bent to practise with so pow-
erful a volition. And there are many others of the same sort both in
England and America, though they have not yet had breathing room
to come forth. I know that excellent ladies will say, " I should not
like to study medicine in that fashion." But then Doctor Elizabeth
Blackwell did like it, and did determine it; and it is only those who
so like and so determine that will be evoked in such a character by
56 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
the new wants of the world. People are born for such gigantic works
as these : Hygeitc nasciinlur, nonfiunt; and all we have to do is sim-
ple free trade over again. Let them try their strength, and have their
chance : if female physicians are a mistake against nature, they will
come to nought. If they are a true function, do not let us throw one
pebble of our unfair and ungallant hinderance in the rough path of
their trial.
96. For my part, Sir Benjamin, I do not think they will come to
nought; and I have adduced this case, because it forms a kind of
head and front to all I have been dwelling upon about the imparting
of medical knowledge to new classes of the people. The entire realm
of practising mothers, of nurses, of sisters of charity of all descrip-
tions, will have its fountain of honor, and well-head of information,
from educated accredited women of scientific talent and real profes-
sional standing. And therefore, though the matter be still a little in
the future, I thought that you, as Health Minister, might as well keep
it in your eye, and have a slight inkling about it. The medical col-
leges here have too long been accustomed to be called bid women :
it would be a pleasant change for them, if some score of silvery voices
from their number could tell the public that they are young ones.
97. But to return for a moment to the practical subject of nurses
for our armies, I would remark that the great omission in the concep-
tion of the office, as an institution, appears to me possibly to lie in
not fairly developing what I will call the female side of armies. It
is only contemplated to form the lower tiers of that needful service,
and of course a large cortege of women who are exempted from the
moral tone of the higher members of their own sex, will be very likely
to fall into temptations, just as would be the case if there were no
heads, no ladies among them, to guide, advise and preserve them,
here at home. The remedy lies in inviting patriotic ladies info the
field. I mean it literally. There are plenty of officers' wives, plenty
of Lady Errols, now mouldering for want of a function, who would
answer this call ; and whose chaste presence and womanly dignity
would protect the female legion, and make it available for medical
service. The sisters of charity are protected by the sanctity of reli-
gion ; why should that be absent from our bands of devoted ladies?
The Teutonic institution only wants bringing up to the mark of the
age, to be the thing still for the succor of the wounded Anglo-Saxon
hosts.
98. False medical dignity must, however, come down to an im-
mense extent in carrying out this courageously. The ladies must be
fairly at the head of their own departments. The gap between the
aristocrats and the serfs in our medical Russia, between the diploma
doctors and the poor nurses, must be filled up by an independent
middle class of healers with an acknowledged charter of their own.
This is a plenary revolution, but it must be accomplished.
99. If there were no other reason, Sir Benjamin, for the commis-
sioning of ladies and subordinate females in this crying hour, you
would find a strong one in the extreme difficulty you will, I fear, ex-
perience, in procuring the required number of Homeopathic surgeons.
You and the country will now find, to grievous cost, what The
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 57
Lancet, The Times, and The Athenanim have been doing for years past,
in discouraging all knowledge of Homoeopathy among the medical
men, and in browbeating those who were determined to inform them-
selves about it They have been only too successful, and now, when
you want Homoeopaths to rescue the men from the jaw of those cas-
ualties which are summed up in the effects of war and pestilence,
you will find that nearly the entire Homoeopathic corps in these
Islands is already preengaged in the ample services of private prac-
tice. In short, they are too few for the people at home. You must
therefore advertise far and wide, and take whom you may ; any will be
better than the Allopathic incapables, who sit beside the active chol-
era, fumbling and tabulating, Death's Statisticians. But probably
you will be enabled to enlist several Homoeopaths from the Continent
of Europe. And you are to recollect, that each of these will be ser-
viceable for a far larger number of patients, than a single medical
man can help under the old plan. But the ladies will be a city of
refuge for you here; for The Lancet, The Times, and T/ic Athenaeum,
have no whit frightened them from studying the true art of healing,
in and for their own circles. They go by facts and cures, and not by
orthodoxy. And this again is one more necessity by which they
press themselves into the public service.
100. Events, however, thicken in this direction before my ink is dry.
Doctor Blackwell is already but one of a band of which Florence
Nightingale is the English chief, and some of the best woman's
blood in this country is speeding to the field of war, to do woman's
work as it has not been done before since the days of Jeanne d'Arc.
I will not trust myself to think or to feel, while the Lord thus calls
up his chosen into their long empty places, lest the brain should be
drowned in the too great hour. Only I will say, it rejoices me, that
medicine, (call it nursing if you please, but it will not stop there,) is
the thing which has unchained the feet of woman, and cast away
her Chinese shoes. And as in sensual Judea of old, the light of this
burning chastity springs forth in the land of the Harem. For the
rest let me watch with reverent amaze, as Providence uncloses these
doors, and shows me the aisles of hero women within, and the inter-
minable human whiteness of the future.
101. Before I quit the special subject of the army and navy, I will
advert to one great service which you must hasten to do for all those
who are in the ranks of either. You know that the Briton, in theo-
ry, by becoming a soldier, does not cease to be a citizen. Now the
citizen at home can adopt Homceopathy if he pleases, without incur-
ring any greater penalty than the sneers and jeers of all the "regular
practitioners " in his neighborhood. But the officer, and a fortiori the
common soldier, has no such freedom. The regimental surgeons
have absolute power over him in this respect. He can get no ticket
of sick leave, without their active interference, without their signa-
ture : and the first question they ask him is, Whether he has taken
their medicine ? If he is a Homceopathist, believing to the core in
the venomousness of old physic, he must either lie, and say he has,
which British officers will not do, or else he must swallotv the potions
to qualify himself for the proper answer. If he declines pill and
8
58 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
draught, he may not get his sick certificate, and is, I understand, lia-
ble to be tried by court-martial. If he is known to favor Homeop-
athy, to have his chest of globules, and thereby to keep himself out
of the hands of the army doctors as long as he can, he is a marked
man, and knows well what he has to expect, whenever necessity
obliges him to hold official interview with the regimental surgeon.
We, on this free shore, who know what the conduct of the medical
profession is here, to alkwho are suspected of Homoeopathy, with
what thorough disdain they are treated by the men of diplomas, may
easily form some slight conception of what the case and treatment
may be, where military sternness and complete power are added to
so much professional truculence, and patients are under the shod heel
of medical mercy. The Homoeopathic officer is paid out in the Cri-
mea with a vengeance, for the freedom of opinion which he dared to
assert, and to commit to practice at home. Can you imagine any
thing, Sir Benjamin, more derogatory to the manliness of our gallant
army, than to be thus coerced by an old-womanish folly of system,
to swallow nausea in the same manner as used to be the wont with
poor little boys in the bad old time ? Think of a bit of a doctor,
standing with his foul cup, and spoon smeared with bolus, over a gen-
eral, and after threat after threat, exclaiming at him with the look of
a court martial in his eye, " Will you take it now?" And yet this
happens every day in substance. The army has got so far as that
Protestants do not cram Catholics, or vice versa, with unpalatable
doctrines ; and why should Allopathy pour its stuff down unwilling
throats ? Let there be liberty in medicine, as in other matters of
creed. At least let the number of Homoeopaths in the force be ascer-
tained— 'tis a vital point for future health — and let the proportion
between the medical men of the two systems be regulated thereby.
It is so already with the clergy. If you will fairly see this point
alone carried out, you will have the thanks of both services, and by
placing them on a level with our citizens, you will rescue them from
the trammels of a disgusting slavery.
102. I am sure, Sir Benjamin, after the fever, the cholera, the sick-
ness, the drenching, the battle, the march, and the siege, it has been a
relief to you to feel the soft hand of the ladies : but we must now
accinge ourselves to other less agreeable considerations. To-day I
received by chance, The Morning- Post, and a side of it was occupied
with a catalogue, headed Medical and Surgical Stores for ike Ann//.
It is from Dr. Smith, the Director General of the Army and Ordnance
Medical Department ; and The Post hopes that " his assurances will-
convince the public that every necessary precaution has been taken to
alleviate, so far as circumstances permit, the sufferings of those brave
men who may unfortunately fall in discharging their duty to the
country." Dr. Smith also " is happy in being able to state, confi-
dently, that the medical officers at Scutari have at their command
every thing necessary to the treatment of the wounded soldier ; hence
there is no necessity whatever, for any effort being made by the pub-
lic," &c. Then follows the list of stores, something like an index to
the London Pharmacopeia, with vast poundage assigned to many
poisonous substances. 500 pounds' weight of blistering plaster : 134
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
59
pounds of calomel ; 150 pounds of contrite jalap ; 1570 pounds of
castor oil ; 30 pounds of contrite opium ; 100 pounds of colocynth
pill, and 100 of blue pill ; 150 pounds of Dover's powder ; 250 pounds
of laudanum, and 250 of tincture of rhubarb. This is taken from
the first list of stores. There are three lists. In the third supply,
sent out on the 15th of September, and which might be landed at
Scutari about the 30th, ten days after the battle of the Alma, there
is an insertion of 5 pounds 2 ounces of tincture of arnica, and it would
appear that on the 24th of October, another similar supply of arnica
will be forwarded to Scutari. After my previous pages, Sir Benja-
min, you will know how to value Dr. Smith's happiness, and the
Italics evert/ thing upon which it is founded. My ideas of every thing
and nothing are at this moment passing through each other; for what
the Doctor calls every thing, I call nothing ; and what he implies as
nothing, is for me every thing. Arnica and rhus are the first every
thing' for the wounded man; arnica has for ages, merited and got the
title, panacea lapsorum: the all-cure of the fallen: 5 pints of arnica,
commanded and inserted in the third list by some soul that loves its
bleeding fellows, arrive at Scutari ten days after the bloody fair.
The list has no veratrum, cuprum, dulcamara, or any of our simples
that save men's lives. In one word, Homoeopathy has not one line
of its own on the huge broadsheet. One battle has been fought, Sir
Benjamin, and how many are yet to fight? Is Dr. Smith's empty
every thing to be the limit that the Health Minister, that the House
of Commons, and that Her Most Gracious Majesty prescribes as
" all that is necessary to the treatment of the wounded soldier."
Then let the bitter tears of friends and relations at home, fall upon
that narrow cruel " every thing" The country, like "Holy Russia,"
practically leaves its fallen sons in the rear, and hurries on to only
brutal glories. On the surgical side of the list there are 109 cupping
instruments; 600 lancets; 100 blood porringers! We might have
left this department, of shedding British blood, to the Russians.
103. Now only think, Sir Benjamin, that all these grim groceries
might admirably have been left behind, to the infinite benefit of both
services, and the great discouragement of the holy Czar. I will not
put Mr. Urquhart on the scent, but it strikes me that if he were to
impeach you for being in Russian pay, he might make out a very
plausible case. 134 pounds of calomel found on your person, you
being in the British camp just before a great action ; and with every
presumption that you intended it, not for the Muscovites, but for our
troops! 1000 and odd pounds of castor oil secreted about you in
three separate places, and more on its way into your possession : and
every reason to suppose that it again was for our men. 100 pounds
of blue pill also, and hundreds of pounds of laudanum, in your per-
nicious wallet ! Talk of poisoning wells, Sir Benjamin ; that is a
trifle to what the Health Minister has sanctioned. A drumhead court
martial might have made short work of you. However, I acquit
you ; clinging to the hope that you meant the poison for Menchikoff
and Nachimoff.
104. Even while I write this, another medical event has occurred
which is significant many ways. The Times newspaper by a hint,
60 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
has called forth a subscription from the public of ,£10,000; a sub-
scription headed by Sir Robert Peel ; for the effectual succor of the
wounded : and the lagging Government has followed in the wake of
The Times. This shows the vast tremble of the public heart, and
what it could do if only rightly directed. But it is going to bolster
up exactly the same system, which has been so inefficacious before :
for it begins from the parlor of the journal in which Homoeopathy has
been already smothered. No arnica is to be forwarded to Sebastopol,
or to Scutari, that I can hear of — no arnica, to assuage the dreadful
thirst of the wounded: no calendula, to make the flesh grow in the
gaping places : no sympliytum for the (shattered bones ! No Homoeo-
pathic medicine chests ! At the bottom of this well-peaked, protru-
sive, cotton-made bosom of the charity of The Times, there lurk horrid
dry ribs of cruelty, a very skeleton in the land. It does good in the
market-place, and murders Homoeopathy, the only true servitor of
the wounded, in the closet. I have been also shocked to see a letter
signed Robert Grosvenor, who is president of a homosopathic hospital,
and member for Middlesex, who knows what arnica and Homosop-
athy are in his own family, yet has not a word to say in the leading
journal, of their application to the British troops. O ! fie ! thou
leader of the people ! Why canst thou not lead them to that good, of
which thou knowest? Very likely The Times would not have put his
letter in, if he had breathed a word of arnica and Homosopathy. But
what then ? it did no good when it was in : it had no rememberable
part, not even a mite of money : nothing but my Lord's dumbness of
the good he knew, indorsed by his noble name. Had he made the
right effort, the military journals, whose especial business medical jus-
tice to the Army perhaps is, would have given him a sufficient hearing;
and then he would not have had the sad reflection of having put his
candle under a bushel, at the time when the British Empire craved his
little light
105. But let me do one pleasant justice: I would to God I could
do more : I rejoice to see chloroform included in the list of ample sup-
plies. That greatest surgical discovery of the age, that prompt Lethe,
has always been to my mind, one of the greatest realizations of the
benevolent " punctuality of Providence." Of course its administra-
tion involves skill, and it may be a fair question, whether a, soldier,
faint from loss of blood, is a nt subject for the appliance of chloro-
form. On the other hand, I do not admire a hypothesis advanced by
a surgeon in The Times, that the prods of the agonies of operations,
are a good stimulus to the half-swooning wounded. There is a sharp-
ness in that practice that hurts humanity, unless the fact be quite
correct ; in which case of course it is humane. But I protest against
recording the small per myriadage of chloroform deaths as conclusive
against the use of anaesthetics. Dr. Simpson, my adversary in all
else, is my true man here. Let another table of deaths, a heavier list
I opine, be balanced against this, — that, I mean, of those who die
of the nervous shock, that the knife gives to flesh and blood and bone.
The one average should be fairly set against the other ; the difference
be taken ; the result be stated to those whom it most concerns, the
patients ; and jas the chances of casualty are confessedly very small,
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 61
the patients may have the choice of braving the peril if they please.
But it would be most inhuman not to allow them the immunity from
pain, which they may crave in moments so terrible as those of surgi-
cal interference.
106. And now, Sir Benjamin, apropos of chloroform, let us take a
peep into those low tents in the rear, where the good surgeons with
shirt sleeves up, are doing their work. The air is hot and fleshy with
the red reek which is there, but the spirit of the day, particularly as
you have lost no blood yourself, will support you from fainting. I
want you to mark all the noble assiduity in that flickering candle-
light; the strong skill of the swimmers in that sea of horrors. There
is a precipitation, too, such as these sanguinary instants demand ; yet
I think it is somewhat chargeable to you and the Board, that the
hurry is greater than it need be. Nature in her direst emergencies,
always has more time to give away than fear and want of knowledge
deem. It is only Allopathy that has no simples, and no waiting, that
is to say, no observation. If you had used your arnica, Sir Benjamin,
on the field, there need not have been quite so much haste in the
surgical tents, and fewer men would have died in their litters as they
were being carried to the fleet. Every operation that can be post-
poned from the battle field to the hospital, gives a better chance to
the patients, and the arnica which you and your Board would not
give, would have made you the time of that postponement. The
system of which you are the head, sends the whole profession of phy-
sic, and especially of- surgery, into an unseemly hurry for instant
effects, and to capital operations. You have therefore now witnessed
•under your own eye, the extraction of balls which ought to have been
left in, and the amputation of limbs which ought to have been left
on ; and that has happened because you and the Board have been
obdurate against the vulnerary remedies of the homoeopaths. In con-
sequence, many lives have been lost, many surgical blunders commit-
ted, much has been done offhand which required great deliberation ;
many wounded men, just dead from loss of blood, have lost more still
by your operations, and have succumbed : and in short, you have
been the patron of the spirit of hurry, which, though it be the ani-
mating breath of old physic, has no part in Homoeopathy ; whose
leading motto here also is, tuto, cito, et jucunde.
107. I must also tell you that you have lost here a fine occasion for
enlisting on the side of the healing art the surgeons themselves, who
have hardly a scrap of faith in old physic, but who will be brought
round to the new faith precisely by witnessing, as pupils of the Ho-
moeopaths, and often of the Homoeopathic laity, the undoubted action
of vulnerary remedies. The late Mr. Listen once told me that " med-
icine was a stupid art." He and his brethren are so much accus-
tomed to real effects with their catlines and bistouries, that they lack
all feeling of solid fact in the no-results for cure of the allopathic med-
icines. But arnica, rhus, calendula, and the other wound herbs, do
proffer such speaking effects of the power which medicines exert in
wounds, bruises, and the like, that if you had first done your duty
unflinchingly over the heads of the surgeons, they would in all proba-
bility, have been converted to physic by the common soldiers and the
nurses. You lost a golden chance there.
62 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
108. As allied to the subject of the drugging of armies, let me
commend Homoeopathy to the transport department, on account of
the great portability of its means. Two or three chests of drawers
xvould have sufficed to contain the Homo3Opathic medicines for the
grand army of Xerxes; exclusively of course of the arnica, rhus, ca-
lendula and symphytum, for the wounded. So great a saving of room,
so great a convenience of carriage, would have rejoiced the spirit of
the conqueror of Scinde, Sir Charles Napier, who abhorred baggage
for working troops. On the ground of expensiveness, too, after the
men have once been provided with their private medicine chests,
Homoeopathy will have greatly the advantage, and Mr. Headland in-
forms me that even with the first supply of chests, it will not be so
expensive as the present system. However, were it ten times as costly
as the allopathic medical stores, its financial benefits would be pre-
ponderant to a degree almost beyond calculation. Nothing so utterly
wastes armies as disease. The damages of 12,000 men dead, and
18,000 hors du combat under Allopathy ; and which make reenforce-
ments brought from 3000 miles' distance continually needful, can
hardly be estimated. In fact, it is these things that constitute the
bulk and burden of National Debts. And accordingly it is easy to
see, that the adoption of Homoeopathy by the British Government,
will lighten the grievous calls of the tax gatherer, and make every
house in the kingdom richer.* It alone will help my Lord Raglan " to
* I extract from the Fourth Annual Report of the London Homoeopathic Hospital
the following as bearing on this subject : —
" The legislatures of two of the most important States of the American Union
(Pennsylvania and Ohio) have granted Charters of Incorporation to Homoeopathic
Universities ; the Chambers of the Kingdom of Bavaria, of the Grand Duchy of
Baden, and other German States, have authorized Professorships of Homoeopathy in
the public Universities; the Imperial Government of Austria has instituted a Pro-
fessorship of Homoeopathy, and sanctioned the establishment of Homoeopathic Hos-
pitals in different parts of its dominions ; in Berlin and Moscow similar hospitals
exist; and one hundred beds in the Hospital of St. Marguerite (a branch of the
Hotel Dieu in Paris) are devoted to patients who are openly treated on the homoeo-
pathic system, by Dr. Tessier and his hospital assistants.
" When the Bavarian Parliament and the Hungarian diet, in 1843, unanimously
agreed to recommend the merits of Homoeopathy to the favorable consideration of
their respective Governments, it was shown, —
" 1st. That, in Germany, the mortality in homoeopathic hospitals was not quite 6
per cent., whereas, in allopathic hospitals it amounted to more than 12 per cent.
"2d. That in severe inflammation, the mortality in allopathic hospitals was
nearly 15 per cent., and in homoeopathic hospitals not quite 5 per cent.
" 3d. That in cholera, the mortality in allopathic hospitals was 56, and in homoeo-
pathic hospitals under 33 per cent.
" -4th. Tnat the average number of days which the patients remained in the hos-
pital was twenty-eight to twenty-nine in allopathic, and from twenty to twenty-four
days in homoeopathic hospitals ; and
" 5th. That in Homoeopathic hospitals, the charge for each patient is nearly half
the expenditure for each patient in allopathic establishments." *
* " We must, however, bear in mind that this saving in money is a double or a three-
fold benefit, for by shortening the time of the confinement of a patient, while it saves the
contributors the expense of his maintenance, it likewise restores him sooner to his fam-
ily, who may be, and probably are, reduced to great straits by his disability to earn their
food, and it gives a vacancy in the establishment for the relief of some other patient, who
would otherwise be excluded from want of room. For the want of funds and the want of
room, not the want of patients, fix the limits to the relief of the sick poor in this coun-
try."— Appendix to a Concise View of Homoeopathy, pp. 222, 223.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
63
bring into the field every available soldier," and enable him to dis-
pense in great part with the necessity of sending home continual calls
for reinforcements, each man of whom costs ,£150.
109. To know the length and breadth of financial and other func-
tion which pertains to you, Sir Benjamin, you have only to recall
what a single medical discovery, lemon juice for scurvy, has done for
the navies of the world : and to multiply this by the other diseases
which Homoeopathy will enable you similarly to extinguish. To
refresh your memory, and help your deductions, I will quote from
Elliotson's Practice of Physic a short passage on this one memorable
achievement of public healing : —
110. " The great cause of this disease," says Dr. Elliotson, "appears to
be the want of fresh animal and fresh vegetable food. It is on this ac-
count that the disease was formerly very common at sea; for, at one peri-
od, sailors were supplied with nothing but salt provisions. So badly were
ships formerly provided for, and so faulty was the general management,
that in the year 1726, when Admiral Hosier sailed to the West Indies with
seven ships, he buried his ship's company twice ; and then died himself of
a broken heart. Deaths to the amount of eight or ten a day took place,
formerly, in a moderate ship's company. The bodies, after being sown up
in hammocks, were washed about the deck, for want of sufficient strength,
on the part of survivors, to throw them overboard. Lord Ansou, in the
year 1741, lost one half of his crew, by scurvy, in six months. Out of
nine hundred and sixty-one men who sailed with him, only three hundred
and thirty-five were alive at the end of the year ; and at the end of the
second year, only seventy-one were fit for the least duty; — not to say
duty, but for the least duty. Sir Gilbert Elaine says that the disease used
to appear in about six or seven weeks from the beginning of sea victual-
ling."
111. " The effects of lemon juice on the disease are speedy and won-
derful ; — so wonderful, that the compiler of ' Lord Anson's Voyage,' after
describing the disease, and the horrors which took place from its ravages,
says that the cure of such a complaint seems impossible, by any remedy,
or any management, that can be employed. Scurvy was formerly set
down, without hesitation, as an incurable disease ; — not only as a disease
incurable then, but as being so formidable in its nature, that it never would
be cured ; and yet, in almost every case, we can now cure it with the ut-
most facility."
112. " So great is the effect of this remedy, that you will find the follow-
ing passage in Sir W. Herschel's work, published in Dr. Lardner's Cyclopce-
dia on the cultivation of the physical sciences. ' At present, the scurvy is
almost completely eradicated in the navy ; — partly, no doubt, from an in-
creased and increasing attention to general cleanliness, comfort, and diet ;
but mainly from the constant use of a simple and palatable beverage, —
the acid of lemon, served out in daily rations. If the gratitude of man-
kind be allowed on all hands to be the just meed of the philosophic physi-
cian, to whose discernment in seizing, and perseverance in forcing it on
public notice, we owe the great safeguard of infantile life ; it ought not
to be denied to those whose skill and discrimination have thus strength-
ened the sinews of our most powerful arm, and obliterated one of the
darkest features, in one of the most glorious of all professions.' "
113. Now ponder this well, Sir Benjamin, and let me remind you
that cuprum will do for cholera, arnica for wounds, rhus for wettings,
64 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
and rhus and bryonia for fevers, that same saving which lemon juice
has effected for scurvy: saving of life, saving of cash, saving of the
material power and glory of Great Britain : saving also of Medical
Humanity.
114. But, Sir, we have yet one more scene to visit together, con-
nected with all we have previously witnessed : a home scene, Sir
Benjamin ; and we must now ascend a mountain of pity high enough
to command the dewy ex tense of three kingdoms. From thence we
have to look down from every point of our warm hearts with a sight
as multifold as the cherubic eyes. We are to see with equal pene-
tration, through the diverse thickness of castles, mansions and cot-
tages, through London and through hamlet, at young wives and aged
mothers, little children, brothers and sisters, — all groups and ties that
are ; and at affianced maidens, ties that were to be. There are rents
and tears to-day in the general life : the bulletin of the dead has come,
and the groups of sorrow are constituted. Splendid Paris bends us
a Niobe or as a Rachel, while the corpse of her much enduring Hero
is borne to the marble Invalides ; other corpses go earthwards with a
shorter procession, helped away by the spades of ruder but more in-
stant sculptors : the rucked sod of the Alma is their urn and monu-
ment in one ; yet every warrior among them is also buried to-day
with swelling greatness of obsequies, if we could see them, in the
everlasting ruby vaults of some human heart. You are touched, Sir
Benjamin, and are justly religious on this summit. Struck down for
a moment from worldliness, we both discourse without an after-
thought, on the immortal state : we hope that the brave are already
welcomed in the land of peace : that the laurels they could not stop
to take, and the earned promotion they seem to have missed, are clad
upon them now by the God of battles in front of the shining armies
of the just. We hope also that if their voices could now speak to
the mourners they have left, the oil of their sure gladness would heal
our faithless sorrow. It is a true strain no doubt, and yet but of mo-
mentary power.
115. Recovered a little from weakness and spirituality, Sir Benja-
min, you ask me what all this undoubted matter has to do with our
present relation ? I will tell you, — all those sorrowing hearts are
your patients. They may not have called you in, but you have called
yourself in as health minister to the British community ; and all gen-
eral and calculable casualties in the human frame, in their healing,
are your vocation. You are Emperor of the Bills of Mortality ; ev-
ery week they issue from your palace. Each day is a battle of the
Alma ; every common death leaves a wounded family in your medi-
cal charge. This bulletin has done nothing but in the way of a little
more suddenness than usual : the shock has been speedier ; hopes of
friends have died in a moment, instead of expiring in months : the
malady of cannon balls has told quicker on the fallen and on the sur-
vivors than other diseases. But it is only a difference of degree.
Similar patients, thousands weekly from London alone, have been
crying out to your Board of Health since its first inauguration.
lib'. Appeal to the doctors about you, unusually grave to-day, by
their human commiseration, to tell you what to do for this piteous
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 65
bloating flock of your shorn countrymen. Remind them that grief
strikes and shatters the body, and that they have given you to under-
stand that the ailing body is their business. Observe to them that
if they cannot, stanch the rushing sorrow in the mind, which you do
not expect from them, they may cancel its eating effects upon the
physical organization. Recall to them that you have read in old
books, of philters for love, and medicines for sorrow, and beseech
them if that tradition be now overpast in the strides of science. Pray
them then lor the better gift that has corne instead. Tell them that
woe deranges hearts of flesh; that it, sends dire dead apathy into the
cordial nerves ; that for long years after such sorrows, those who have
forgotten to mourn, still feel cold lumps of ice instead of the cheerful
pieces of their breasts, and walk with half-alive frames and vitals,
because the blood springs have been frost nipped. Ask them whether
this, and the beginning of this, be not as much within their province,
as hypertrophy with dilatation, or disease of the semilunar valves.
If they have nothing to answer you, Sir Benjamin, and above all if
they smile and commence to leer, come out of the midst of them, for
they are doomed doctors. If you stay where they are, you will catch
flinriness out of their ribs.
117. And yet I am too certain there is not a word in them, else
they would have said it long ago. They have fallen upon another
direction : Augsea, not Hygeia, is their chosen path. Let them be
committed to the sewers for life, with The Times and Dr. Fungus
Kantanker of The, Athenccum fording the inky drains at their head,
seated one behind the other in paper caps on Mr. Chadwick's pony.
You and I are now the clearer for Homreopathy. Benign as usual,
apt as usual in resources, gathering up as usual the cures and pearls
of the whole medical past, full of new observation and old witnesses
of common sense in man's wonderful body, the art which sprang by
providence from Hahnemann's front, comes armed and equipaged to
the door of the national sorrow. The bodily grief shall be chastened ;
it shall pass away without scathing the vessel ; wailing shall have its
decent time, and then shall be exchanged for work : the tears shall
flow fast, but shall not eat the guarded cheeks : the man shall follow
his brother to the tomb, and then, unspoiled, shall proceed by the spir-
itual tracks of industry here to follow him in the spiritual life: God's
armies on the material shore, shall keep tramp and pace with His
parallel white-sailed fleets on the eternal ocean. The doctrine of the
true medicine shall do for the body, what the faith and sight of the
Christian effect for the soul. That earthwardness of the frame which
bending sorrow makes, and which continues itself into disease, shall
be raise'.! upright again ; just as the fruitless regrets of the mind are
redeemed into manliness and womanliness, by the consolations of re-
ligion. The strict bodily side of this, in its general aspects, is what
the Health Minister owes to the people : it is the sweet accompani-
ment to your bitter Bills of Mortality ; and I will now tell you the
beginning of how to manage it.
118. There is a plant, Sir Benjamin, which grows in the far islands
of the Eastern seas, and which, in the Homosopathic giving, is a most
sovereign remedy against the injuries of sorrow : that plant is termed
9
66 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
ig-natia amara ; a plant bitter like sorrow itself, and like good sorrow
of infinite beneficenee in its intentions. If there had been a Board
of Healing, that Board, with the bulletin, would have recommended
to all whom it might concern, to mix a dozen globules of the sixth
dilution of ig-natia in a wine glass of water, and to take a teaspoonful
of the tasteless and harmless mixture three or four times a day for two
or three weeks. That issue of directions would have been the medi-
cal collect for the occasion. But few of those heaviest struck, would
do it for themselves, because grief is absorbing, but the more erect
members of the afflicted families would press it upon the attention of
the rest, representing to them that all duty required them to provide
for their future prospects of health ; especially since the loss of the
family's strong arm, in a father, or a husband or brother slain, added
to the call of strength which would be made on the remainder. In
this way, perhaps by little and little, the use of this invaluable drug
would be propagated. The same would apply to the deaths of each
week; and to those which every post may bring as the upshot of our
future battles. If you had known and done this part of your func-
tions, we should more seldom hear such histories as this: " Mrs. So
and So never held up her head again after the intelligence of her
son's death : Miss Blank died of a broken heart when her lover was
killed : the old mother of Lieut. P. never smiled more after she heard
the fatal news." I might multiply these cases to any extent; they
are a common bodily fruit of the battle of life; and the numbers
crippled and carried downwards, and slain outright in this way, is a
matter only to be known by those, who have a large acquaintance
with the diseases of the people. Death in this way, engenders death
among the proper living ; the crops of wounded, bruised, and broken
hearts come as regularly in this mortal world as crops of grass ; for
all flesh is grass for the Old Mower. Providence has sown broadcast,
general remedies for this general disease ; simple and applicable to
each day's processions of mourners. Of these remedies there are
many, but Ignatia is perhaps the first. I can tell you from abundant
practice, that it is of a true efficacy. Sometime ago, Sir Benjamin,
I received by post a most lugubrious-looking letter : like the very billet
of an undertaker. I had lost a good relation just before, and on
breaking the large sable seal, lo ! and behold! a sympathetic house
in Regent Street had sent me a catalogue of all mourning. I could
have dived into black by that list down to very Cimmeria, and come
up death's own chimney sweep. It struck rne as a remarkable coin-
cidence, that just on that day that commercial house should divine
my loss, and proffer its answerable livery. 1 then recollected that my
relative's passage out of life had appeared in that morning's Times,
and I began to put two pieces of an event together. On comparing
notes with others, 1 discerned at length that the proprietors of that es-
tablishment consulted the newspapers every day, and sent their
mourning list to all the directions in which deaths were chronicled.
Very decent, spirited, and tradesrnan-like ! The thought then occurred
to me, that that shop knew and did its business a great deal bet-
ter than the Board of Health, which, with an exhaustive knowledge
of the families in which current deaths have happened, never yet sent
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 67
a single recommendation to the people, availing to obviate the general
maladies that come of sorrow. Perhaps you will tell me the doctors
ought to manage this : but why the doctors ? A general prescription
from your hand will apply to the afflicted at once. There will un-
doubtedly be cases in which other simples will be needed, true medi-
cal cases ; after so great a number have been cleared away by your
Board, a very few skilful Homoeopaths will suffice for the remainder.
The registers of the several districts, who are in close relation with
your Board, and who wait upon every house in case of death, may
form a ready means of carrying out your humane intentions here ;
as they do already in the matter of vaccination. There is nothing
more impertinent in guarding the public against the injurious conse-
quences of grief, than in insuring them against those of small pox.*
The one service is only a little higher than the other, in the offices of
a progressive Ministry of Health.
119. I shall not apologize for being repetitious, Sir Benjamin, for
iteration of plain facts unknown to you is my business and my duty;
and therefore I again beg you to observe, that that Homo3opathy de-
spised and rejected of your Board and The Times, is here again the
only candidate for the medical service of the State. The medicinal
treatment of not one single mental symptom, and of not one bodily
affection springing from the influence, emotions, and conditions of
the mind, has been attempted by old physic. If it had, the prescrip-
tions, judging by all the rest, would be so unmanageable, that you
could never commend them to suffering masses of your countrymen:
each one would require the presence of a medical man to obviate its
own bad consequences, or at any rate to see that it was not carried
too far. Allopathy does not even know that another drug, chamoinilla,
given in globules, will cure a large proportion of the cross tempers of
infants and little children, and reduce fractious nurseries to order. It
stides crying with .opium. In short, it has neglected specifics alto-
gether; has made no studies of the effects produced on the mind
by drugs ; and is not aware that those medicines that engender, in
healthy subjects, certain tempers, moods, and states, will extinguish,
in Homoeopathic doses, those very tempers, moods, and states in indi-
viduals morbidly suffering from them. I therefore repedt that> as
Health Minister, Homoeopathy is your plan and your system, yoiir
* The reader will do well to keep the instance of vaccination before him, as of-
fering perhaps the solitary specimen in which old physic, instructed here by milk-
maids and the common people, has laid firm hold of a HomcDopathic practice and
law : for of course vaccination cures one disease by infecting the system with
another similar disease. What is the consequence of this certainty depending on
a general principle of cure? Why, that this point of practice comes at once into
relation with the Government, being applicable, by the simplest means, to the
masses, and to nations. And mark this, wherever a specific is found for maladies
which are common, that specific must ultimately come into legislation, ami engen-
der laws to insure its being carried out. This is the plain and pressing interest of
every state upon earth ; as attested in vaccination, which is the germ of state med-
icine. Homoeopathy has numberless such simple specifics, and it is easy to see
that it knocks at the door of Parliament in such a manner as must insure its admis-
sion among our statutes, being welcomed there by the already existing vaccination .
laws. Allopathy raises no such claim.
68 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
sole chance for healing manifestoes, and that at this present, you
have no other.
120. I dare say, Sir Benjamin, I shall be accused by the doctors of
materialism ; though indeed I am no materialist, but believe in the
distinction of man from all matter, and of human life from all other
life. Yet it is a fact that drugs do affect the mind, and the study of
their effects thereon is most important for the cure of mental and
bodily diseases. I shall also be told, in this proposed matter of
chastening general griefs, that sorrow is a sharp blessing which does
the soul good. But sorrow enough will be left for that, after you
have done your best. Moreover this is parallel to the surgeon's
remark in The Times, that the horrid smart of the knife is a proper
stimulus to the wounded man. I should have thought that the wound
itself might have sufficed for the supply of this quickener. But let
me not waste my brief hour with you in any more side remarks to
the boors of Fogydom.
121. Did it ever occur to yon, Sir Benjamin, that the principles of
science have done great things for us in this particular age ? That
one chief difference between what we are, and what we were, as a
material estate, lies in the fact that certain principles have been dis-
covered, and applied ? It is true, we have not got far towards the
world's core, but we have laid hold of facts which themselves stand
as principles to many other facts ; and thereby we have attained a
wide command of consequences. Railroads, telegraphs, steamships,
steam printing, and a hundred other new things, each have their
germ in a stroke of genius at some more central power than had be-
fore been handled, and which, once grasped, became, by incessant
experiment, our servant thenceforth for innumerable behests, — things
which before we did not venture to expect. Each of these things has
come into the service of the State, with a readiness exactly in pro-
portion to its importance. By this means the machinery of power in
the hands of this Government, has become enormous : heat, electri-
city, mechanical leverage, speed, power over winds and waves, are
exercised in the Cyclopean under world of the State, as if it were a
little viceroy of the energies of the earth. And while individual force
is at the highest, the sheer force of the country overtops all private
stature!* of power. As a result, look at the transport of great armies
in mighty fleets; at the steady landing of the myriads; at the novel
strength of every man from the knit strength of the whole; and
then acknowledge that a few principal facts, laboriously worked out,
have altered the relation between our race and the planet. Now
where, 8ir Benjamin, is the corresponding fact in physic? Medicine
is to this Russian war just where it was to the last great war : with
the .single exception of disputed chloroform, there is no general dif-
ference. Jt is not an inch nearer to the Bureaus of Government : it
has gained no principal facts that it can impart to the state : it has
no simplified modes of treatment communicable in a few words from
the heads of departments to their subordinates : it saves no greater
numbers than formerly from epidemic visitations; it has achieved no
rule of treatment and no unity of opinion among its own professors:
in one word, it offers no mechanism of State Healing to the com-
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 61)
monwealth. What a disgraceful antithesis it is to the progress of
the world ! A profession which, from lack of healing facts, is a rope
of sand in this most strong-linked age of time and empire of nature.
You may gather together two hundred and fifty doctors in the
Crimea, but with every good will but one on their brave part, they are
two hundred and fifty little pebbles, which have no cohesion. For
the proverb increases in point — doctors differ. How is it possible
such a concourse of atoms can have any affinity with the State ?
You might as well now expect a queen's message to travel by the
old coach down to Edinburgh. They are all private incommuni-
cating gentlemen together, Sir Benjamin, and can have nothing to
do with your Ministry of Health. That wants new principles, unity,
cooperation, association ; such as landed us in the Crimea, and such
as, medically applied, \vill put us on the shores of a desired and
promised land of healthful power.
122, Now Homoeopathy is exactly such a State Mechanism as old
physic is not It is general and simple to a Health Minister's hand.
He, charged by his faithful Homoeopathic Council, can prescribe in
a few words, for whole classes of his subjects. It has one principle
on which all its professors are agreed, similia similibus curantury
one fire puts out another's burning. By this it commands the field
of pathology, and makes ever new conquests ; the irremediable
disease of to-day is curable to-morrow, because a drug producing a
like disease has just been found and proved. It is especially appli-
cable to epidemics, in which I include for the nonce the casualties
of battle, general rribrbid states of the national mind, ordinary pesti-
lences, and the like : (looked at from your elevation of statistics, it is
hard to say what is not epidemic:) and it is so applicable for a good
reason, viz., that it has a general principle of cure. It preserves, and
not even temporarily injures, during its administration, the efficiency
of its patients. It is rapid beyond all former precedent in tackling
acute diseases, and landing them in speedy convalescence. It is be-
loved in the nursery and the lying-in chamber, because it is so gentle
and so strong. It is dear to the soldier, for it kneels down and serves
him the moment he falls on the field of battle. It touches mind
equally with body, and is able to give a nation that confidence of
having a real elixir in its wallet, that is itself a tower of strength
against disease. It dispenses light to the populations, because it has
liberal light in itself. It inspires its professors also with a faith and
hope that are the very pulses in the arm of skill : and with a delight
in healing, that puts off the doctor's fatigue to the late hours of his
day. Sir Benjamin, it is just the thing for you, and most willing to
be yours for the service of the British people. You will find that it is
" Hail fellow, well met " with steam and progress, light and electri-
city, and with all the new loves and charities of man, and all his
strengths, all over the world.
123. I have hitherto tried to give you a little opening of the new
duties which will amount to the constitution of the Board of Healing,
and which will be altogether different from those of the present Board
of Cleanliness, which will be next to Godliness, when it is associated
with your own distinctive or Homoeopathic Ministry. At present
70 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
however, your Board of Cleanliness is in a totally false position, co-
operating with Allopathy, which dirties as fast as yon clean. You
and it are like a bad housemaid, which first scrubs and then litters;
then scrubs and litters again. Carry your sewerage pipes a little
higher and finer; insert one of them by an hourglass hole into the
bottom of the calomel bin, and carry another into the lowest level of
the castor oil tank ; and then you will drain away the sources of
many a national and individual malady. You will also then be at
one with yourself, which is the source and beginning of all action.
When your ministry is once well afoot, there is nothing to which I
can liken its functions, but to a certain tree promised some day to
be planted in a cleared and renewed earth, and in a city which comes
from above downwards : a tree "which bears twelve manner of fruits,
and yields its fruit every month, and the leaves of that tree arc for the
healing of the nations." For every month yon will put, forth leaves
of cure. The heat of summer and the ice of winter, the malignant
oast wind, the equinoctial perturbations, the damps and fogs of all
English seasons, are a set of general causes with which you will do
current battle : and each as it comes will have your comment, and
the instructions of your ministry how to meet. it. The herbs are
growing, Sir Benjamin, and gathered too, which will clothe oar
human nakedness with immunity as it passes through these destruc-
tions of the year, and give it that which is truly human, fixity of
principles, and self-maintenance in the midst of the fluxes of nature.
You have only to take these herbs out of the open hand of Homoeop-
athy ! Besides these causes also, you will attend somewhat carefully
to the general seasons of man's life ; for these too are fully perturbed.
From teething to toothlessness, there are many general maladies which
you will treat on your great scale. First comes the infant, mewling,
for which you will teach mothers to give homoeopathic chamomilla,
and pewking, for which they will give similar ipecacuanha, in the
nurse's arms. Then comes the cutting of teeth, for the pains of
•which enlargement of powers, they will give again chamomilla, and
in hot heads, belladonna ; saving convulsions oftentimes, Sir Benja-
min, and piloting the small skiff through quiet tarns. Next the in-
fantine diseases; aconite and pulsalilla for simple measles; nitx
vomica, ipecacuanha and drosera for whooping cough; and belladonna,
and mercuriiis for domestic scarlet fever. You will sympathi/e es-
pecially with growing pains ; for you know how bad they are to bear:
it has cost your own bones a heavy ache to get them out of the allo-
pathic dwarfing: you know how hard it has been for yon to grow
from the infinitesimal good of the old school to the gross benefactions
of the new : you will therefore publish from your high seat, that the
young who are expanding with pain and weakness, shall have two
globules of calcarea 30, twice a week ; and if in a month they groan
still, a globule of phosphoric acid 12, every morning. Next you will
have regiments of young damsels under your eye at the age of sweet
sixteen, and for these you will order pvlmlilla, and if the roses of their
cheeks are long in coming, occasional suljthur. At 21, wherever love
has not been happy, you will not forget ignatia. Later on, at and
about the ripe Indian summer of woman's 40, and a little after, your
WAR, CHOLERA, AXD THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 71
general recommendation to that fine age in your subjects, will be
sulphur and lachesis. Recollect also that you bear " twelve manner
of fruits" — most divers attentions to the people. And in the course
of your pilgrimage among their ages, you will now meet with many
middle-aged gentlemen, otherwise strong, who are in a sad state of
confusion, obstruction, and if I may so speak, constipation. They
are melancholy victims of your former no-doings : specimens of what
Allopathy runs into when it tries to be generous, and to constitute
domestic medicine, for its tender mercies are cruel: in short, slaves
to the pill box. Take all these under your wing at once : tell them
that this constipation from which they are breathless with running,
is an allopathic bugaboo, a turnip with a red lamp in it. They will
do you credit. Tell them to burn carefully all their pill boxes, and
to lend you their health for three or four months : also tell them to
mix three globules of mix romica 12, in a wine glass of water, and to
take it night and morning for a fortnight. If they are not cured, let
them do the like with sulphur 12 : and so on alternately for the three
or four months. At the end of that time, you will have a very small
percentage of them on the list ; and these will come under medical
treatment. Now why should you not put that much, for these peo-
ple, occasionally in the papers, advertising the benignity of your
office ? The Morrisons and Culvenvells put their pills there for gain;
and why not you, your healers, when you have nothing to get by it
but the health and blessings of your British flock. The Ministry of
Health might present it compliments in that shape, without any
degradation to that general mass of sufferers. You already approve
of a greater interference than this in what you call emergencies, when
you order " house-to-house visitation : " all general forms of sickness
are an emergency to the sufferers, and it is therefore both your right
and your duty to hunt them out and pursue them, till you convert
them into wholeness.
124. In the course of your practice, Sir Benjamin, for you will have
such a blessed practice as no physician on earth has even desired, one
mariner of your fruits will be especially administered for the eradica-
tion of hereditary tendencies and diseases. With the most delicate
pipework of the science of your Board, you will proceed to drain
those old swamps and miasms that undermine the populations of
your country. Rickets and scrofula will come under your decisive
engineering. What " the criminal classes " are to the moral state,
that these born infants of disease are to the physical humanity; and
you will be the Lord Shaftesbury of a new realm of the children of
pain. The rags of their poor flesh and bones will be the hospital card
of their admission to your bounty; and before they are thought of by
their future parents, they will be precisely cared for in the foundations
of your paternal institution. Those great human morasses termed
workhouses, will begin to be won into cultivation and sanitary pro-
priety by your efforts here. You will tell these people that the nature
of things is not all against them ; that there are true substances on
their side ; and you will order them for their young rickets, two
globules of calcarea carbonica 30, in fourteen teaspoonfuls of water,
a teaspoonful to be given every morning. This they will continue
72 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
for weeks, or months, according to benefit: and afterwards they will
do the same with su/p/t/tr 30, given in the same way; returning upon
the calcarea every now and then for another month. You will also
order cod-liver oil in half teaspoonful to the infants, once or twice a
day. You will make many bandy legs straight, Sir Benjamin, many
too large heads and stomachs healthily cornpassable, by these in-
credibly simple means : you will save many a crooked back : and in
after life many a case of consumption. Your success here will
greatly increase your practice, for by very deeds you will have got
into the hearts of the poor. You will also have disembarrassed the
doctors of a new set of domestic cases ; and given them time for
their own real part : a vast advantage for medicine proper, as I can
tell you.
125. Nor will the world of your country's industry be omitted from
the care of your humane Bishopric of Bodies. You know that in
the exercise of daily callings various injuries are apt to occur, by
fixed laws, on account of a certain incompatibility existing in nearly
every mode of life with the natural requirements of health. One
reason of this is, that the great esprit de corps, the fire of industry
and commonwealth love, is not sufficiently white within us, to spread
over us the full shield of its own immortalities and immunities ;
in consequence of which, our circumstances attack and bite us more
than they ought. Large classes are too sedentary, and work their
heads more in proportion than their bodies; digestion, which equil-
ibrates the body with the head, suffers grievously therefor. Many
also work in smoke and dust of various kinds, and the organs of
breath labor and are in danger. Many too, crowd their minds of a
day with the cares of fifty years ahead, spend and invade their night's
sleep, and become bent and aged in their courage and their nerves.
In short, you know well the story of the occupations of the people
as affecting the national health. Now for these general causes you
will hold medical councils, and as your light comes, issue general
prescriptions. Imagine the happiness resulting from your triumphs
here ! Your antechamber, without a sycophant near it, receiving
occasional deputations of the trades which have made Britain what
she is : the ninefold Industries of this great people, the Anglo-Saxon
Muses, come up to London to give a specimen of their strong
quality of hearty thanks under the window of the Health Minister.
Sheffield and Manchester, and the Coal Men of the Tyne and Wear,
and a hundred busy swarms besides, each grateful for longer averages
of life, and harder powers of working ! I scarcely think that the
applause of the Houses of Parliament to a victorious general can be
comparable in its reception to the flush of heart which will be yours,
when you thus receive from the vigorous Artisanship of the people,
the testimony of gratitude for that expanded health which your
adoption of the homeopathic power and light has enabled you to
confer upon the industrial populations of your country.
126. Doubtless, Sir Benjamin, you have noticed one odd novelty
in my address to you: the intermixture of seemingly great things
with seemingly small : things that touch the heart and soul in the
one breath, and pilules and globules in the next. That mixture is a
WAR. CHOLKRA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 73
doctor's life. He stands in the midst of all pains and all apprehen-
sions, and the agonies of disease, and the solicitude of friends, cannot
long keep his unswerving eye from his little bottles. The Prince of
Healing, whose minister you are, hears the blind man's prayer : " Lord !
that I might receive my sight.:" He stoops down to the ground, and
makes clay of spittle, and " purges the visual ray." We too must
stoop down to that same ground, for it. is the great Pharmacopoeia.
This profession upon which you are embarked, is the meeting-place
of the health of the body and the soul, " ubi mystici aguntur convent us,
et sacra junguntur fa'dera" And stooping and rising, stooping and
rising, are the, native undulations of the medical art. Therefore in
my singularities of style to you, I have not been untrue to man's hill
and vale, to the sublimity and lowliness of my subject.
127. I have indeed tried to batter down much, and if I am not mis-
taken, I have made some of the main square blocks in the old forts
of Allopathy chatter in their places, so that they will come down at
leisure, with I hope as few doctors injured by their fall as possible.
Yet my course is by no means destructive, for I have not only pro-
posed something better and happier for physic itself than the old
walled towns by which it now menaces Society, but I have also shown
you in solid vision, models of a new ministerial palace for you and a
true Board of Health, brighter and ampler, more useful and more
commanding, than was ever yet inhabited by a British minister. If
you would only take possession, amid the acclamations of the nation,
the trumpet applause of both services, and the far-heard hymning of
our patron, St. George, and the sanitary angels ! You will also per-
ceive that I am not cap in hand in your antechamber, and want no
place in your councils. I prefer my freedom of voice, as useful to
me beyond even the livery of her Most Gracious Majesty; and I
reserve it untrammelled for the next, and if need be, for many future
occasions. For though I abhor scribbling, and sorrow for having done
so much of it, yet this crisis is a different matter; and because the
Mural Crown is the badge of my race, and healing is my business, I
will never be silent when I see the great interests of the country tram-
pled under foot by the hard neglect of those who should know better.
Sir Benjamin, I pledge myself not to rest until the snowy standard of
Homoeopathy waves over the Ministry of Health, over the Army and
Navy, over Printing House Square, and until its telegraphic signals
from the head quarters of your New Palace pass far and wide, with
healing on their wings, to every the remotest corner of my beloved
country.
128. Having said thus much, Sir Benjamin, and I have a right to
say it, for you are my member as well as health minister, I will now
proceed to the constitution of the Board of Health, which is the first
matter for you now to think of. We have already settled by facts
beyond cavil, that your adoption of Homoeopathy is your only chance
of having an active system of State Medicine, and therefore of course
you do adopt it. The next point is, how to administer it ; and plainly
this can only be done by a council of Homoeopaths. Old physic will
clearly decline all appointments made in this sense, and decline them
ungrudgingly; because you are not interfering with any thing it ever
10
74 WAR, CHOLERA, AN7D THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
intended to do, or dreamed of as possible, but about to perform func-
tions quite new and to it most foreign. It will then jog on its own
\vny. Let the appointments therefore be made, and seat around the
green baixe table such of the chiefs of the homu-opathic power in
London as will heartily cooperate with your intentions. I should
like to see Dr. Laurie there, because he has done more than any one
else perhaps in the world, to carry Homoeopathy to mothers and into
private families, and to build up the dornestie part, of it. For the
rest, there are many men of great ability who will be able to serve
you. I confess it would also please me to have Mr. Brady on the
board, because I yet hope that he will be the Luther of Homoeopathy
in the House of Commons. Allopaths are, of course, inadmissible,
just as single Homoeopaths would be in a false position in the present
Board of Cleanliness. You must make a clean sweep, and not try
the dangerous experiment of putting our new wine of life into the old
chemists' bottles. If I might make another suggestion, I would
advise you, even on the Medical Board, to have at least three intel-
ligent homoeopathic laymen. Because, as you are going to write
directions and prescriptions for the whole laity of the kingdom, these
gentlemen will be able to tell you at once whether your instructions
are clear and intelligible to them, and presumably therefore to the
rest. And as they will be family men, they will represent in that im-
portant council, the domestic medical wants of the people.*
1:29. I have called you Emperor of the Bills of Mortality, but in
your new robes of healing, you will soon cease to deserve that title.
In the course of a few years the rates of death weekly, will be so sen-
sibly diminished, partly from the active power of your means of cure,
and partly that drugging, bleeding, blistering, and calornelizing will
have passed away forever, that old age will come to be connected
with death once more, the doctors will escape finally from Moliere
and the comedians, and the decease of mankind will be due to Nature
and to Providence, whose benignity alone can sustain the credit of
it In the mean time, as life will be longer, the state will be stronger,
and new colonies to lisp your name and imitate your institutions will
proceed out of the loins of your Hygeia of Westminster. Sir Benja-
min Hall's save-all — Homoeopathy, will make a present to the Brit-
ish empire of the population of a large capital city every year. Your
functions will thus come to be associated exclusively in men's minds
with the constant topping of births over deaths, in short with life and
the living; and your Bills shall then change their name, and shall be
called the Bills of Nativity.
130. Besides all my other reasons, Sir Benjamin, I see ground for
knowing that these great changes are imminent, not only in the pres-
ent crisis of war and cholera (which indeed proclaim a summa dies et
* One obvious part of medical reform embraces the reconstruction of the office
of Coroner, which can only be tilled properly by a Honni'opath, cither lay or med-
ical. For it is clear that Old Physic is so bad a judge of what is Violent Death,
that it is incapacitated for an office in which that is the main question. For
the same reason, no inquest ought to be considered as valid or transacted without
having had the benefit of the testimony of one or more homoeopathic physicians or
surgeons.
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 75
ineluctabile tempus for old physic), but also in what I would term a
chronic crisis, which has been gradually revealing itself to all thinking
mortals. So much is expected from every man now, so much work,
and so much facing of his subject, so much turning over of the golden
minutes, that he has not time for the indulgences and the neglects
of former days. We cannot afford to sit at our dinner tables, tippling
port wine by the hour together, when we have head work to do this
evening, and busy to-morrow in prospect. Neither have we leisure
for the calomel, salts and senna of our ancestors. Function is alto-
gether too rapid for such rust as this to come into it. None but gen-
tlemen of fortune and consummate indolence have a right to these
fads. There is an anecdote which I have always found very pro-
phetic on this score; of Earl Howe, I think; who feeling himself one
day indisposed in his cabin, and living before the days of Hahnemann,
incontinently took a black draught. He gave himself up to be useless
for the next three days. Suddenly a strange sail, perhaps many
strange sails, hove in sight, and rapidly came nearer. He was sum-
moned on deck, saw likelihood of work, ran straight to the side of the
ship, exclaimed, " By God, this'll never do," put his finger down his
throat, and shot the black draught into the sea. This admiral is here
a mythos of Britain and Allopathy. And looking from the hint of
him, I have known, that as the country gets busier and busier, it will
spew that whole system out of its mouth.* That time has come; the
industrial iron is hot; our duties increase with every morning that we
rise from our bedsj the enemy of inaction is in sight; and Neptune
is waiting over The Britannia's bulwarks for Old Physic.
131. Your statistical tables of mortality under the new Board, in-
stead of being dry diagrams, upon which the barrenness of medical
art is exhibited every week, will come to throb with scientific and
humanitary interest ; and year after year the comparison between
them will be most precisely instructive. You will find some large
items of death almost struck out of your list by Homoeopathy; pneu-
monia and fever, whooping cough, measles and scarlatina, will cease
to occupy their present gross places, and your relations of numbers
will be altogether changed. You will know the tools that have worked
this clearance, and will then proceed, by all public invitation and
encouragement, to seek for specifics for the more intractable parts of
your statistics ; to dig out the old malignant stumps of disease. Ho-
moeopathy will date much of its own progress from your exact regis-
trations and crying requirements. It is true, no government can
create a Hahnemann, no premium evoke or encourage him, and no
applause from senates or sovereigns make him work one jot harder
than he does for the good of his kind. But then, though seeds and
* This morning I had a confirmation of the truth of this as applicable especially
to the industrious artisan. A good woman consulted me for her husband, who has
a bad cough. Two days ago he went to " the club doctor/' who prescribed him an
ounce of salts. l- This'll never do," was his wife's thought, so she came to me. told
her story, and wound it up by saying (the Italics are her own), " The idea of giving
a working man an ounce of salts." This matter of Allopathy, by the by, is a vital
thing as connected with finance for Benefit Clubs : they will improve their in-
comes, and increase their stability, vastly, by calling in the homoeopaths.
76 WAR, CHOLERA, AND TIIR MINISTRY OF IIKALTH.
geniuses roiiio from God, cultivation, which also comes from Him,
inakos their generations proceed, and ihoir works universal. And
your Ministry of Health will have vast opportunities of expanding
and enlarging iho Homoeopathic Powers. On questions of medicines
you will avoid one fault, which, like the1 wolves of hunger and pov-
erty, ha< ruthlessly pursued old physic: you will listen to the voice of
simple populations of remote places and rural districts, when they
tell you of their herbs and their >imples, and of the cures which their
"irregular" good old Women and good old men have performed in
their houses. \}y this means, like (Slant Antsrus, you will get a shoot
out of nature's veins of strength, by touching the medical earth again:
Hygeia will bloom in cheek and fire in eye by sometimes breathing
her native country air among the rustics and village maidens; for
you will then find out, that medicine has her birthplace in these unso-
phisticated abodes; and that the best things in the proud Pharma-
copoeia are nothing but the tangled and matted tops, of which herbs
and simples are the root. Think what a dominion of inquiry is here,
for a Health Ministry and a British Government, which has lands and
gardens and ancient populations under its sway in every climate of
the globe. I have often heard it regretted by intelligent officers in
our Indian army, that the medical corps in Hindostan will obstinately
know nothing of the plants and simples made use of by the native
doctors and simplers, for no one who is not M. D., or M. R. C. S. E.,
has a medical existence in their eyes. But following Bacon, you will
take stock of all this unlearned knowledge, which ever has been the
valuable raw material, out of which science and cures are made. You
need only set this on foot, Sir Benjamin, by a hint to the lay mem-
bers of the British army, and an invitation to British subjects in all
parts of the world ; and within a year or two you shall enter a new
world of medicinal substances, shall extend the laboratory of every
vegetable chemist at home, and shall lay a basis for new physic,
which, both in solidity and amplitude, will far surpass that of Dios-
corides. You will then be on a level with the age, on other great
branches recently constituted, and the beautiful lineaments and land-
scapes of physical geography will have their humane double, in that
which especially pertains in a medical sense, to this swelling Anglo-
Saxon life, Oceanic* or Geographical Physic.
132. You will also see now, Sir Benjamin, that there is such a
thing as State Medicine, and that it is a most active industrial sum-
mit of the healing art, which receives from the art and science of
Homoeopathy its specific powers, and gives them, according to the
importance of the case to the nation, either the stringency of legisla-
tive acts, or else the high patronage and recommendations of the
Health Ministry. Vaccination for small pox, and lemon juice for
* I borrow this word "oceanic" as a formula from one erf the most remarkable
books of our time", Smith's Divine Drama of History and Civilization. To Britain,
according to this book, belongs the inauguration of a new providential epoch,
which is no longer Judean, Greek, Roman, or French — no longer national and
mediterranean, but planetary, universal, or, as he beautifully calls it, oceanic. If
this mission be ours in other things, is it not also our part to constitute the begin-
ning of integral or oceanic physic?
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 77
scurvy, are the types of its twin departments. You can hardly fail to
have put together in your mind, some of the timbers and rafters of
this great institution. State Medicine hitherto has been confounded
with Police Medicine, or Medical Jurisprudence ; but, that is another
as big mistake as confusing the Board of Health with the Board of
Cleanliness. State Medicine heals the masses, as such : it can have
no other meaning. It helps virtue, skill, industry, economy, strength.
Police Medicine hounds murderers and ferrets poisoners, where ordi-
nary evidence fails to net or to track them. It assists the lawyers
and Jack Ketch. There is as great a difference between the two, as
between the Old Bailey and a royal palace ; or as between old physic
and Homoeopathy.
133. There is an ancient story, Sir Benjamin, which I never think
of without Homoeopathy rushing into my head at the same time. It
is from the Scandinavian mythology, and tells us of the build and
convenience, and of the qualities, of the ship of the gods. That ship
is called Skidbladnir, Sky-leaf or blade, or perhaps Sheath-leaf; it
was made by certain dwarfs, and was by them given to the god Frey,
the god of seed and abundance. It was made of so many pieces,
and with so much art, that when it was not wanted for sailing, it
would fold up together like a kerchief, and Frey could put it in his
pocket. When it was wanted by the gods, he took it out of his
pocket, and carefully unfolded it, putting first one foot into it ; pliant
then, he could put his second foot in; and when his feet were in, he
could get into it himself. No sooner was one man in it, than two
could get in ; and when two were in, three and four; and so on more
and more, until the entire array of Valhalla, god and heroes, could
swarm over and into its space-respiring sides. When the full-armed
host was on board, as soon as the sails were hoisted, the ship had fair
wind, and went whithersoever it was steered. When done with for that
time, it went in by like stages exactly as its crew of gods left it ; and
by the time they were all on shore again, Frey had it between thumb
and finger, retired into a mere purse of a ship, and replaced it quietly
in his pocket. That ship is the first way of telling us of Homoeop-
athy, and you are to be the god Frey, the happy possessor of it.
The freightage which it carries is the basis of the godlike in man,
the health of the human family. It is made by the dwarfs, for these
are the secret principles of science, working away in the smithies of
the under world, but privileged at length to present their completed in-
dustry to the fruitful daylight powers. It lies at first like a pinch be-
tween the apprehensive fingers, for it has a principle, similia similibus
curantur, so curt as to occupy but a single cell in our intelligence ;
but the principle is a practice also, and no sooner is it wanted, than
it opens like a huge airy fanship, and most unlike the cramp-ribbed
allopathic luggers, and embraces all needs and departments of heal-
ing. Sick armies and navies one after another lie snugly bedded in
crews, regiments and legions, in its comprehensive berths. The wind
of success which lives within its sails, is no other than the harmony
of nature and truth, which lends itself to immediate occasions. But
when its hospital wards are empty, it again shuts up, and is nothing
to the public eye. I think you will acknowledge, Sir Benjamin, that
the old Rune Men saw Homoeopathy, together with many other true
78 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
principles and practices, from a kind of mythical Pisgah, when they
launched that simple intinitcsimal ship, and undeterred by its first
si/r, put Valhalla \viihin its hospitable ribs. They meant for you
there a practical lesson, in the convenient minuteness of principles,
in the elasticity of art, in the success of true nature, in the little cost
of real skill ; in the humble unobtrusiveness of the best means after
their work is done. The homoeopathic medicine chest of the new
Ministry of Health is undoubtedly that ship sailing now into the port
of London, and its instructions to ailing populations are the voyages
which your gods and heroes are to make through this ocean of time.
134. Speaking of Skidbladnir, "the best of ships," reminds me
also of the wolf Fenrir, who was the worst of wolves. Of him it is
also written in northern Runes, and as Homoeopathy is prefigured in
what happened to him, I will also tell you a little about him. He
came by a monstrous kind of birth from Loki, the god of mischief;
he was very small at first when he was brought out of the chaos of
giants to Valhalla, where he was fed by the unwitting gods; but he
grew so much every day, and the seers foretold such ruin from him,
that the gods got a strong chain made with which to bind him. The
wolf saw that he was more than a match for it, allowed it to be put
on, and with one struggle and spurn burst, it in pieces. The gods
prepared now a second fetter half stronger than the first ; but out of
this also Fenrir shook himself in no time. The first chain was the
band of fraud, the second was the band of material force ; but neither
of these bit him. The gods were now alarmed at his prowess, and
they sent down Frey's messenger to the country of the dark elves,
again to certain dwarfs, and had a chain made termed Gleipnir, or
Gulper. It was smithied of six things, — of the footfalls of cats,
and of the beards of women, and of the roots of stones, and of the
sinews of bears, and of the breath of fish, and of the spittle of birds.
This Gleipnir was fine and limber as a silken thread. The wolf, with
great reluctance, and exacting a heavy pledge, allowed it to be put
upon him ; it mastered and gulped him in the wrestle, and held him
in its elastic belly for a thousand years. Fenrir, you perceive, the
wolf which we all have to keep from the door, is disease. The first
treatment of the monster, who grows up among and at the expense
of our godlike powers, is naturally by fraud ; we try to cheat disease
and death with all strong diversions ; but they grow in spite of these,
and even acquire head and power in overcoming the false chain
Lceding or stealth. The body and substance of our enemy being
recognized, the second chain with which we would cabin him, is vio-
lence, his quality; and from this false force also he dashes with ease,
feeding on our rashness as his own hay. For he is said to dash out
of the fetter Drbnri, which means our tight squeezing; whereby we
force disease into new conquests, and as the people say, drive it in.
The fetter effectual, Gleipnir, the gulper of disease, comes out of
dwarfland, the under world of the sciences, in fact, Germany, and it
is made of impalpables, magnetisms and decillionths, and called
Homoeopathy : a dynamical scientific power. The rune book says :
" Thou inayest have seen that women have no beards, and that no
pat falls from the tread of cats, and that there are no roots under
stones ; but then, on the other hand, by my troth I know that all I
WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH. 79
have said is equally true, (with thy no sight,) though there may be
some things that thou art not of might to experience." This signi-
fies the impossibility and improbability of Homoeopathy, the noth-
ingness of it; and at the same time its power and its fact. I don't
know that it would be possible to put its case into a clearer relation
to itself and its predecessors, valetudinarian fraud, and allopathic
force, than in this old myth ; which stands written for your instruc-
tion in one of the earliest records of the Gothic race.
135. And now, quitting stories, Sir Benjamin, I hope that in your
old age, (which may God and Homoeopathy long put off and pro-
tract,) when this Marylebone has been resigned, and your palace of
health is occupied by your successor, you will write a final Bridge-
water Treatise, as the legacy of your faithful life and the record of
your providential experiences, for the home archives of the British
people. The wisdom, power, and goodness of God displayed in the
creation! No longer the anatomical muscles and tendons of the hu-
man hand, but the living Divine Palmistry itself is your theme. The
revelation of God to man, in the great healing power as it wells from.
God. You will show that the smallest drops of the life of nature,
juices beyond all eyes to see, have each their predestined and most
manifold play of charities for the human constitution. That man is
put down upon a planet made by an Everlasting Physician, — a
globe whose flints, chalks, and sulphurs are to repair the old depth of
his diseases, and whose plants grow for our casualties, and to pal-
liate the trembles and pains that seasonably arise out of the stem of
our weakness. Yoa will show that poisons are run through with
goodness, and that serpents are emblems and processes of eternity in
this also, that life for the ailing mainsprings of life lies under their
well-appointed fangs.* You will show that water and air are great
pharmacopeias, as holding the world of medicaments in solution :
the air columns of each parish for itself, and the boundless envelope
for us all. You will stand in wonder among the peaks and spits of
the electric laws, and will surmise that they also are medically pre-
cise; that they pierce the flashing heavens that health may come
down. In evidence of all this you will look with humble satisfaction
at the long unrolling of your statistics. Like a river getting purer
and purer, they run from the muddy beginnings of pestilence and
disease, by their own virtue dissolve their grievous freight, and tend
us into the desired haven and sea of a clear and common old age.
The human hand of Providence, Sir Benjamin, the vein work and
sinew work of God's mercies, is seen, and will be more and more
seen, in this grand correspondence of nature with our wants, and
your wants ; in this medical sufficiency of the universe to the primal
creature. If you please, it shall be the last theme that the first Health
Minister of this kingdom, as he stands on the great brink, shall re-
hearse for our children's children.
136. Yet long before this day comes, you will have the clergy of
these realms on the side of Homoeopathy, which has opened to you
* Let me give my meed of praise to Dr. Rutherford Russell, for introducing Co-
bra poison as a homoeopathic remedy in diseases of the valves of the heart. It is
a marvel which will yet tell upon the statistical tables of the Ministry of Health.
80 WAR, CHOLERA, AND THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
and the nation all this intelligence, and all these substantial blessings,
Already in great part, they have comprehended the large divinity
of their mission ; and many a parish has its priest, and many a dis-
senting (lock its minister, who like our .Master, dispenses healing to
both the body and the soul. Allopathy laughs at this, as it would at
"the elay made with spittle." But the ministers of religion know
their work, and do not take counsel of man ; and I leave the cause
in their hands and God's, with entire confidence in the result.
137. Minister of Health, and my dear Countrymen, and Country-
women, I am done. I have written to you in haste, as it were be-
tween bedside and bedside, in the intervals of urgent duties. Impe-
rious haste! For Old Physic is felled to the ground by the double-
headed hammer of war and pestilence. There it lies, blessed be God!
" Violence," saith the Psalmist, " is hunted to overthrow, and destruc-
tions come to a perpetual end." But then there also lie wounded and
cholera-smitten legions, biting the dust, and no one nigh to help them.
I tried to do my part by a voice for Homoeopathy in the Leading Jour-
nal. It choked my voice. Nothing was left me but to quit my loved
privacy, and appeal in my own smallness to you and yours. With no
spite to any man, but with indignation against a vile system, and
grief for its victims, I cry aloud to you. Will you then listen to
facts for yourselves, and force; the tardy Government and the Minis-
try of Health to send out efficient succor to bleeding and dying broth-
ers who bleed and die for you? Will you insist upon a great and
immediate approval and appointment of Homoeopathy? I ask not for
its trial, but. for its adoption ; for it has been tried, and it has succeed-
ed through half a century. Recollect, you cannot shift the responsi-
bility now to the shoulders of Old Physic : incapable of all action, it
cannot carry for you a straw of the burden that leadens your con-
science. It can no more help you to an opinion on .this matter, than
it can open the graves of your kinsmen whom it lets die by sea and
land, and bid them live again. You must act for yourselves, asking
no question of Medical Boards, whose sentiments as well as prac-
tices you know too well already. Above all, you must not diploma-
ti/e with Old Physic, Which is the quick Ally of Death and Brother
of Pestilence. Time presses. Cholera and wounds have no medical
treatment. We are on the eve of great battles, and each of them is
fought under the horrors of unrelenting diseases. You have oppor-
tunity still to save thousands ot lives, and to prevent miseries incal-
culable. Contribute open mindedness, courage, and human love, as
well as money, to the Patriotic Fund. Answer your Queen by giv-
ing two mites ; one, all your soul, the other all your substance. Now
is your accepted time, now is your day of salvation.
ArrENoix. — I am pleased to add the name of the distinguished Dr. Charge, of Marseilles, tn those who
make it their iMisiriexs to instruct the laity in medical practice. In the Preface in the Ninth Edition of his
Traitrment fjiimaopathiijue Prinerratif ft curatif du Cholera t'.pidemiyue. Instruction populaire, pouvant srrvir
df Gitide. en I'abienee du M -limn. Marseille, 185-1 ; he says, "J'ecris, cette foin, pour le« malades et arm de
leur etre \ raiment utile, jo dirai ce iju'il cst e.sseiitirl de connaitre." At p. fi, "'/"out le mantle, sans lire me-
drrin, prut et doit gitrrir le chulfra, grace* d V Hnmaopalhie. . . . I)e.<< 1849 j'esperai le plus grand hicn de cette
Jn*trurliun Pnputaire ; aiijourd'hui fort dc tciimi^M.-iL'i-s nnmbreiix, j'affirme que, par le secours seul de ce
travail, leu gtns dn moiiilt ont pufri un Ires-grand nombre de cholfriquf,i. . . . Otte affirmation n'est autre
eho-e que 1'exprension affaiblie de la plus stricte verite, et pourtant e'<ut rile qui a rfrulte le plus lr..im -derm-, de
Vancirxne, frule." This pamphlet dhows that Homoeopathy has been applied with ereiit success by Dr. Cabrul
(physician to the late Marshal St. Arnaud) to the cholera which raged among the French troops at Varna.
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